“With precision, heart, spine, and bite, Tyler McAndrew charts the often-treacherous terrain between loneliness and grace. A young boy befriends an unseen prisoner at the edge of the woods, a divorced father haunts his former family from inside the walls of their house, a daughter watches her mother’s mind slowly betray them both—these are stories marked by deep compassion, where small gestures illuminate the largest mysteries of life. In this brave debut, we find proof that, even in our most solitary hours, we are firmly bound to one another through memory and love.” —William Lychack, author of Cargill Falls
“Heartbreaking and at times unrelenting in its humanity, My Prisoner and Other Stories offers an empathetic look at the violence and tenderness within everyday existence. McAndrew challenges readers to hold onto wonder, even as they are confronted with the brokenness of his characters and of the world at large.” —Thao Thai, author of Banyan Moon
“These stories orbit misunderstandings, mishaps, miscommunications, each shining a spotlight on a character seeking and aching for some kind of connection, the very thing I desire from a short story, from art—to be pulled into its orbit, to be made to feel a connection. If you’re reading this now, I’m excited for and jealous of you spending time with this beautiful collection.” —Aaron Burch, author of Year of the Buffalo
Set largely in the 1990s and early 2000s Rust Belt, My Prisoner and Other Stories gives us protagonists who repeatedly confront helplessness in the face of others’ suffering. A teenage girl tries to help an elderly woman who has locked herself out of her house only to be shaken by the trauma and loneliness that the woman—a Holocaust survivor and recent widow—eventually shares with her. A schoolteacher writes letters to his cousin, who has schizophrenia and is serving a life sentence for the murder of three of their relatives. A middle school student makes a complicated gesture of charity after befriending the poor kid at his lunch table. Siblings seed the ground for an eccentric treasure hunter only to find that their prank leads them into unexpected emotional peril. The structural forces that stain life in late-capitalist America—the prison system, economic desperation—lurk throughout these muscular and empathetic tales, but in the face of endemic adversity, shrewd and loving characters strive for and sometimes achieve hope and tenderness. Tyler McAndrew shows us an unadorned America that can still tap its capacity for human kindness.
Tyler McAndrew was born and raised in Syracuse, New York. He lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he teaches creative writing at both the University of Pittsburgh and CAPA 6–12, a magnet school for the arts in the Pittsburgh Public School District.
Contents
My Prisoner
The Familiar Dark
Shit Plate
The Wrong House
The Cursed Treasure of the McDaniels Kids
You Have to Talk to Mary Anne
Lake Shore Limited
The Storyteller
Crime and Punishment
Hand-Me-Downs
How I Came to See the World
Blindness
Letters from Toby
