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Won't you please join me at 6 pm on Friday November 6 at the Garden District Book Shop at 2727 Prytania for the launch of Guess This Is Kaput, my story collection from Cowboy Jamboree Press. I'll be giving a short reading from the book, then having a conversation with poet Brad Richard.A laborer at a shipping facility in Northwest Arkansas is written up for using a homophobic slur, forcing him to reckon with the ways he idolizes his philandering, country-singing daddy. A woman comes home to rural New Hampshire to care for her father after his motorcycle accident but runs into her dirtbag ex. On the same day a racist ex-San Francisco cop is pushed to the breaking point by a conflict with the couple moving in next door, his wife tells him she wants a divorce. A musician coming home to Portsmouth, New Hampshire tries to build a life with the woman he loves, only to be derailed when his one-time best friend, who is also her ex and the father of her child, gets out of prison.
In Guess This Is Kaput, characters are forced to grow, sometimes evolving and redeeming themselves through love, and sometimes failing to evolve in spectacular fashion. Set across the country in the Bay Area, New England, Northwest Arkansas, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast, the stories are informed by a powerful sense of setting, dramatizing the ways in which place entangles us. Trapped by family, by lovers past and present, and by their own flawed ideas of who they are, the characters in these stories struggle to achieve sometimes dubious ideas of freedom.
“The stories in Guess This is Kaput are full of dark humor, tenderness, and yearning. A wonderful, poignant collection you’ll want to read again and again.” – Annell López, PEN/Robert Bingham Award Finalist and author of I’ll Give You a Reason
“I've been reading Tom Andes for years and Guess This is Kaput is Andes at his best: soulful, funny, offbeat, humane. These stories are a shot in the arm, and weirdly, somehow, a solace.” – Peter Orner, author of Esther Stories and Maggie Brown & Others
"Somehow clear eyed and bleary eyed, these are trips worth taking." --Dean Schlabowske of the Waco Brothers
Shamus Award-winning writer Tom Andes is the author of the detective novel Wait There Till You Hear from Me (Crescent City Books 2025). His stories have appeared in Best American Mystery and Suspense Stories 2025 and The Best Private Eye Stories of the Year 2025. He lives in Albuquerque, where he is a working musician. He can be found at tomandes.com.
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Garden District Book Shop, 2727 Prytania St,New Orleans, Louisiana, United States
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