The Gunman and The Carnival: Stories

by Catherine Gammon

Timely and introspective, Catherine Gammon’s The Gunman and the Carnival is the meeting of contemporary voices and visions that offer not relatability, but an intimate encounter open to strangeness and its embrace.  The stories in the inimitable Catherine Gammon’s The Gunman and the Carnival — loosely linked and set in Los Angeles, California — center on women of various ages and backgrounds. Constructed around themes of solitude and connection, creation and destruction, love and loss, these sixteen stories unfold in a world haunted by individual and collective violence, systemic injustice, pandemic, and environmental not with genre sensibilities of the dystopic or apocalyptic, but with compassion and wisdom that renders a staid, meditative examination of our contemporary challenges. The Gunman and the Carnival does not aspire to be a panorama or to portray the city (or the nation) in its extraordinary complexity. Rather it shines a roving light into the minds and hearts of an idiosyncratic handful of characters living in our difficult times and invites each one to sing. Some of the stories are realist, some oblique and fragmented, others metafictional or surreal, and the urban / suburban landscapes are accented by the occasional appearance of wildlife and the presence (and voices) of trees. Handled with grace and intelligence, these stories chronicle contemporary the violence and the joy examined in equal measure. 

144 pages, Paperback

Published February 6, 2024

About the author

Catherine Gammon's new collection is The Gunman & The Carnival from Baobab Press. Her novels are The Martyrs, The Lovers; China Blue; Sorrow; and Isabel Out of the Rain. Her earlier story collection is Beauty and the Beast. Catherine's fiction has appeared in literary magazines for many years, including Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Iowa Review, The Missouri Review, Cinncinnati Review, and The New England Review. She has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Corporation of Yaddo, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, among others. A Soto Zen priest, Catherine was ordained in the lineage of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi by Tenshin Reb Anderson in 2005, at Green Dragon Temple / San Francisco Zen Center. Before Zen training, Catherine taught in the MFA program of the University of Pittsburgh, and she lives in Pittsburgh again, with her garden and her cat.