Exit Paradise: Stories

by Domenic Stansberry

The stories in Exit Paradise are stories about family and about place. The family, most often, is an Italian-American family named, ironically, the Johnsons. The place, usually, is the vanishing edge of the California suburbs, where identity, culture, and desire merge in ways that defy easy stereotypes. An Italian matriarch dies, and her deathbed curse haunts the sexual adventures of her grandsons at the other end of the continent. A young man tries to rescue his own life by imagining the death of his brother. The President of the United States, searching for guidance, visits the Los Angeles Coliseum on the eve of a foreign invasion. These and other stories make up the world of Exit Paradise, richly textured, disturbing at times, revealing - in unexpected flashes - the submerged reality that exists below the surface of everyday life.

160 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1991

About the author

Domenic Stansberry is an Edgar Award winning novelist known for his dark, innovative crime novels. His latest novel, The White Devil, tells the story of a young American woman in Rome, an aspiring actress, who— together with her too charming brother— is implicated in a series of crimes dating back to her childhood days in Texas. Stansberry is also the author of the North Beach Mystery Series, which has won wide praise for its portrayal of the ethnic and political subcultures of San Francisco. Books from the series include The Ancient Rain, named several years after its original publication as one of the best crime novels of the decade by Booklist.

An earlier novel, The Confession, received the Edgar Allan Poe Award for its portrayal of a Marin County psychologist accused of murdering his mistress.

Stansberry grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and currently lives in a small town north of that city with his wife, the poet Gillian Conoley, and their daughter Gillis.