Thieves I've Known

Stories

Title Details

Pages: 208

Trim size: 5.500in x 8.500in

Formats

Paperback

Pub Date: 02/15/2017

ISBN: 9-780-8203-5144-5

List Price: $20.95

Hardcover

Pub Date: 09/15/2013

ISBN: 9-780-8203-4537-6

List Price: $26.95

eBook

Pub Date: 09/15/2013

ISBN: 9-780-8203-4636-6

List Price: $26.95

Thieves I've Known

Stories

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  • Description
  • Reviews

In these wondrously strange and revealing stories, Tom Kealey chronicles the struggles and triumphs of the young and marginalized as they discover many ways of growing up.

Their names are Merrill, Omar, Shelby, Laika, Winston, and Toomey, but most people don’t see them. They are boxers in training and the children of fishermen. They are altar boys in a poverty-stricken parish. They are assistant groundskeepers and assistant camel-keepers. They travel with the circus, care for disabled siblings, steal police cars, and retrieve the stolen boots of a priest. Ranging in abode from Puget Sound, Washington, to Pamlico Sound, North Carolina, they are abandoned yet courageous and plucky children and teenagers living on the edges of society.

Thieves I’ve Known is a collection of powerful, moving stories about the lives of a redemptive and peculiar cast of young characters who become easy to know and difficult to forget.

Tom Kealey might be my favorite short story writer and this astonishing collection is long overdue.

—Stephen Elliott, author of The Adderall Diaries

I’ve never gotten such a sense of place from a collection of stories that so spans the nation. Kealey’s characters are survivors, orphans spiritual and legal, living in an America where real joy and real struggle share an unmended fence with the realm of myth. This is a book of transit and transition, drives and conversations, wilderness and outskirts, all of it rendered with gorgeous humanity—and with such adroitness the sudden power of each conclusion takes the breath right out of me.

—Scott Hutchins, author of A Working Theory of Love

Needy is not quite the right description for the characters in Kealey's strong story collection. . . . While they are living on the edge, their powerful sense of self and duty belies their lack of funds, though nothing masks their hardscrabble life. . . . Kealey creates both characters and landscapes with a sure hand, making for a memorable collection

—Danise Hoover, Booklist

Thieves I’ve Known is a collection of quietly remarkable stories, timeless in their ability to reveal the extraordinary in the most seemingly ordinary of lives. Whether writing about grocery store baggers or altar boys, circus workers or amateur boxers, Tom Kealey transports us to the innermost worlds of unforgettable men and women, thanks to his keen understanding of character, his exquisite rendering of place, and his mesmerizing sentences. Thieves I’ve Known is one of the most moving, most beautifully written books I’ve read in years.

—Lysley Tenorio, author of Monstress

A powerful collection, mythic in feel, Thieves I've Known is a book I've long anticipated from a writer I've long admired. I'm not alone. The Rumpus founder Stephen Elliott considers Kealey possibly his 'favorite short story writer.'

—Scott Hutchins, The Rumpus

About the Author/Editor

TOM KEALEY is the author of The Creative Writing MFA Handbook. His stories have appeared in Best American Nonrequired Reading, Glimmer Train, Story Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, and the San Francisco Chronicle. His nonfiction has appeared in Poets and Writers and The Writer. He received his MFA in creative writing from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he received the Distinguished Teaching Award. Tom has taught creative writing at Stanford University since 2003.