Praying Drunk

by Kyle Minor

The characters in Praying Drunk speak in tongues, torture their classmates, fall in love, hunt for immortality, abandon their children, keep machetes beneath passenger seats, and collect porcelain figurines. A man crushes pills on the bathroom counter while his son watches from the hallway; missionaries clumsily navigate an uprising with barbed wire and broken glass; a boy disparages memorized scripture, facedown on the asphalt, as he fails to fend off his bully. From Kentucky to Florida to Haiti, these seemingly disparate lives are woven together within a series of nested repetitions, enacting the struggle to remain physically and spiritually alive throughout the untamable turbulence of their worlds. In a masterful blend of fiction, autobiography, and surrealism, Kyle Minor shows us that the space between fearlessness and terror is often very small. Long before Praying Drunk reaches its plaintive, pitch-perfect end, Minor establishes himself again and again as one of the most talented younger writers in America.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Book Club, Contemporary, Essays, Religion, Literary Fiction

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 13, 2014

About the author

Kyle Minor is the author of two collections of short fiction: Praying Drunk (2014) and In the Devil's Territory (2008). He is the winner of the 2012 Iowa Review Prize for Short Fiction and the Tara M. Kroger Prize for Short Fiction, one of Random House’s Best New Voices of 2006, and a three-time honoree in the Atlantic Monthly contest. His work has appeared online at Esquire, The Atlantic, Salon, and Tin House, and in print in The New York Times Book Review, The Southern Review, The Iowa Review, Best American Mystery Stories 2008, Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers: Random House Presents the Best New Voices of 2006, Forty Stories: New Voices from Harper Perennial, and Best American Nonrequired Reading 2013.

http://www.kyleminor.com

Praise for Praying Drunk:

“The stories [in Praying Drunk] span decades as they move from Kentucky to Haiti and points between, but they work in concert to slowly reveal the landscape of an emotionally desolate quasi-America sinking under the weight of its own faith. Minor writes beautifully about these ruined lives.” - The New York Times Book Review

“The beauty of Praying Drunk is that it transcends suffering to evoke the sublime.” - Los Angeles Times

“Nothing here is contained, the way a hit single on a record stands alone—characters recur, themes and forms are deepened and visited again, moments glimpsed earlier come back with haunting force. ” - The Atlantic

“[Kyle] Minor mauls you with his vicious prose, and then takes your hand and asks you to join him in a form of prayer.” - Electric Literature

“When the characters residing in Kyle Minor’s engrossing and lively Praying Drunk find a toehold on the good life, I hope that it’s autobiographical. When the characters find themselves enveloped in desperate situations, irreversible circumstances, and despair, I pray that it’s solely out of the writer’s imagination. These fine stories–up there with the best works of Padgett Powell, Donald Barthelme, and Robert Coover–never straddle a milquetoast fence: they’re extreme in humor, extreme in sorrowfulness, and 100% individually-wrapped masterpieces. I am haunted and mesmerized by this collection.”
- George Singleton, author of Stray Decorum

“Praying Drunk gets the whole thing down: the cosmic muck and the local glory, the big questions and the tiny lives, the bullies and the saviors, the screaming at the sky and the lights by the side of the road late at night on a long drive. I finished this book with my heart pounding and grateful, my coffee cold and my smile wide and crying like a baby.”
- Daniel Handler, author of Adverbs and The Basic Eight

“Watch Praying Drunk’s lovely, lonely people wrestle with Minor’s dark God and remember when you too tried to reason with Him and unravel His mysterious commands. These passionate tales, full of longing and daring and honesty, will disturb and inspire you.”
- Deb Olin Unferth, author of Revolution

“Similar to a great magic trick, the 13 stories in Minor’s (In the Devil’s Territory) latest lure reader investment with strong visuals while simultaneously pulling the rug out from underfoot with clever, literary sleights–of-hand. Though not necessarily linked in the traditional sense, there is a sequential order to the collection—ideas, locations, incidents, and characters echo as the volume chugs forward—and the result is an often dazzling, emotional, funny, captivating puzzle.” – Publishers Weekly

Reviews

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title of Praying Drunk: Stories is a little misleading. While it is a collection of short stories, they could have just as easily been chapters in a novel.

A warning at the start of the book tells the reader to read the book in order. Not to jump around. It's definitely good advice.

All of the stories are interconnected with one another. They either involve characters who pop up in other stories, follow the same characters through different times of their lives, or in some cases tell the same basic story in an earlier story but from a slightly different view.

Q: Why do you often tell the same story two or three different ways?

A: It's not done with me yet, I forgot something important, or I hadn't learned it yet.

Q: You still believe in something as old-fashioned as meaning-making?

A: Maybe the biggest fiction I want to create is that it all matters. It matters so much. It matters and matters.

At the center of these stories are a few key incidents. A meeting with a bully. A suicide. A broken marriage. While other things happen in the stories and other events take center stage, it's these few incidents being juggled around the background that make up much of the cohesion of this collection, or novel if you want to think of the title as a complete statement, rather than a title and a genre descriptor following it.

Maybe because it is the way that I choose to write, in the way that I probably should just keep a journal, or a blog or try to peddle my shit somewhere else and not just put in the in the guise of a review when I'm really just talking endlessly of myself, but I get the repetition of the same stories. I get in the first "Q & A" story, quoted from above, the need to return over and over and over again to the same ideas, and in an infuriating way I do this in almost all of conversations, too. I won't let things die, they have to be revived over and over again, they need to be looked at once again in light of this one thing I had forgotten, mistakes get noted and corrected and then worked on again. Better time might be spent using the time I waste on these repetitions trying to just fix up the original, make it read better and say what I want to say instead of just starting over once again. Once again with all the grammatical errors still in place. The wrong words typed and missed by some stupid browser spell-checker. To crush the defensive shell that wraps itself around all these utterances.

If I haven't lost you yet, good.

These stories may or may not be exorcising of the author's own past. One of the characters is named Kyle Minor, and there are those two "Q & A" stories where it appears that the author is speaking directly to us, but those aren't exactly crystal clear that it is the author we are hearing or a character who is the author. This isn't exactly ground-breaking stuff, but it's not done in a gimmicky manner, and it helps in creating the cohesion between the parts and the whole.

If I had to give one or two criticisms of the book I'd point to the Haiti stories. The first one feels a little out of place in the collection up until that point. The second one feels like it belongs, but I found the length of it to be a bit off-putting. It's quite a bit longer than all the other stories, and while it does involve peripherally a character from earlier stories, it's main focus is on people who don't quite fit into the folded over quality of the other stories. This wouldn't feel so jarring if the story wasn't almost sixty pages long, or 27.9% of the book. Because this isn't a novel it's not that big of a deal, it's not like a whole new character and story are being tacked on towards the end of a novel your invested in, and you're given this new character and story when all you really want to know is what the fuck happened to the characters and stories I've been engaged in, but it is still a little weird feeling.

If I didn't come out and say it above, I enjoyed this quite a bit. It felt similar to Ron Currie Jr's Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles, and it should be enjoyable to people who like George Saunders and that sort of short-story writer.

[Pamela · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most striking books I've read in a while. A note facing the Table of Contents reads: "These stories are meant to be read in order. This is a book, not just a collection. DON'T SKIP AROUND." Yes, that last is in caps. You might be tempted, out of anti-authoritarian sentiment, to defy this directive, but you would be making a mistake. When you get to the end of the book, you will understand why the author wants you to experience it this way.

Praying Drunk IS more than a collection. The stories here share themes and obsessions and in some cases, characters. Minor wants to foreground the question of storytelling--why we do it, how we do it, what, if any, are the limits to our doing it. Does it "help"--to make sense of the world, to ease our pain? Or, having told a story, are we left only with the need to tell it and tell it again?

Minor takes on some of life's darkest material here--children abused by other children, abandonment, suicide, the failure of dreams. But his narrative command is so absolute that I never wanted to look away. Among the things I love about Minor's storytelling is that you absolutely can't tell where he's going. He immerses you with rich authority, without the expected foreshadowing-rising action-climax-falling action crap, and I know that wherever I end up, I'm going to have felt and seen something new.

A side note: Two of the stories powerfully deal with Haiti and the intersection of American and Haitian lives. One, "In a Distant Country," is in length and scope more of a novella.

This is only Kyle Minor's second book. I'm wondering WTF he's going to do next.

[Paul Bryant · Rating 3 out of 5]

Seems to be a thorny peculiar intriguing twining together of memoir, nonfiction articles and straight(ish) short fiction. I couldn't tell sometimes which was which, and I loved that. One story "There's Nothing But Sadness in Nashville" was immediately entered into the P Bryant List of Great Short Stories, it's a companion piece to Dorothy Allison's awe inspiring "River of Names", both are ghoulish horrendous catalogues of unexpected mortality amongst the less affluent social strata of the southern states. There's a couple of long pieces about Haiti during the fall of Baby Doc Duvalier, I'm guessing Mr Minor might possibly have been in that place, but the internet could not confirm that. There's a short dab of science fiction. There are a couple of abstract Q & A pieces. Not everything is great but the strength of writing behind all these experiments comes across unmistakeably, and therefore it seemed quite chilling to find that he hasn't published any books since this one in 2014, almost ten years ago.

Final note - this volume is published by Sarabande Books of Louisville, Kentucky and it is a very beautiful edition. All your famous writers would be so happy if their famous books looked half as good as Praying Drunk. Small publishers are great.

[Lawrence Leporte · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am, I'm afraid, an insufficiently serious person. I mingle with serious people and even read some of the books they read, but I lack their metropolitan sophistication and emotional sensitivity. Next to them I'm like a President's chucklehead brother, telling corny jokes and launching my own brand of beer.

Thus there is a real question as to whether I am qualified or even entitled to read a book like this - which so clearly calls for a degree of refinement in the reader and a fairly large capacity for the apprehension of subtlety – let alone to comment intelligently on it. And my actual reading of the book confirmed such doubts, which therefore must loom heavily over this review.

Yet I was utterly captivated by what I found. By Kyle Minor's soft-spoken genius, and by what I would describe (ineptly, I suppose) as a system of emotional organization and response that is much different to my own. By the light he sheds on the unreason and flaccidity of thought that's out there, whether we like it or not, inhabiting corners of the universal consciousness, facilitating stupid relationships with substances, and dragging its captives, by hair or by earlobe, from the manky couch in the double-wide to the next dumb-assed and ill-advised deed or gesture.

This book challenged me. And not just in the general sense of a trite and anodyne observation that one might casually offer up in a review, but in certain highly specific ways that I am prepared to try to detail here.

First off, we have this dude with shit on his trousers, and he's climbing a fence next to the freeway, and this scene is so perfectly rendered that I'm shaking my head and thinking 'what the fuck' (my internal dialogue, naturally, quite high-minded and effete). I mean, just, what the fuck. But then there's this process, almost some form of transubstantiation really, whereby I become that dude. That's me, with the shit on my trousers, trying to scale that fence. There's this weird zone where absurdity and very deliberate, studied intention combine, and although it's perhaps meant on the surface to look entirely stupid and unlikely to the reader and/or any passing highway patrolman, I come to the realization that this is the very zone where I spend something like 60 percent of my waking life. (A percentage that was undoubtedly even greater before I read a couple of the Stephen Covey books.)

Then there's the suppurating wound on the old man's tumor. I recoil in disgust, but am immediately ashamed of myself for doing so. I keep seeing that old man now, in the roofless structure with the piles of builder's sand. There with little more than the dignity of his faith. This is the world that I've become so accustomed to keeping myself apart from - the world of ignorance and pain and gross, sickening swollen body parts. I tend to respond in the manner of Queen Victoria, drawing the blinds in my carriage as it passes through the slums - and maybe cracking open a can of Billy beer.

(Incidentally, a polite heads-up here – unless you're a med student, the Sebastian story is not one for your lunch break.)

These were big moments for me. Did I like them? As I was reading them, no, not necessarily. But on reflection (this book gets you to reflect) there was that feeling you get after a hard workout. The sense that you're somehow better off for it.

And but in the best tradition of this kind of writing, there is no bombast. It insinuates. These people, these characters, are all so unlike me or even anyone I know. They shoot themselves or get caught up in weird missionary crap or bizarre situations in hospitals or whatever – but these scenes stay with you, and after a while there's a part of you that almost seems to be in the scenes, just as you eventually find yourself coming into the AA meetings with Gately in Infinite Jest.

The emotionally stunted rube (i.e. me) is lured in by the writer's mastery of the language and appeal to the intellect, only to find that he becomes invested on an altogether different level. I'm back reading The Catcher in the Rye in high school, discovering – with a mixture of pleasure and unease - that a certain type of story-telling has the power to shake me to the core.

There are, however, a few things about the book that I don't care for (even though accepting that a certain base level of annoyance is needed to rouse a jaded, cynical, flinty-hearted beer-drinker from his emotional stupor). The chronic self-pity sort of bugs me - I feel bad about admitting this, but there it is. The Q&A passages are, in my opinion, unnecessary and in places come off as somewhat twee. Several of the stories are in the vernacular, which I didn't necessarily find convincing at all times (cf. William Faulkner) and which occasionally felt a little forced and mannered when compared with the parts that seemed to be in the author's own authentic voice. This, however, is probably uncharitable nit-picking and also quite possibly inapposite. I know how hard it is to write fiction and, frankly, far be it from me to criticize anyone's work – the Georgia hayseed weighing in on the finer points of his brother's foreign policy initiatives.

This dude, Kyle Minor, is as far as I am concerned an outright literary genius and is, absolutely, one of the few people whose every published word I will want to read.

[Kirsty · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kyle Minor is well-known in the US underground lit scene, and the stories from Praying Drunk have been popping up in literary magazines and anthologies for several years. At first glance, this is a collection of angry-young-American tropes: pistol suicide, violent men and bitter women, trailer parks.

But as the stories unfold, there's something much more complex and interesting at work, and often the tales are so raw, so deeply unpleasant, that the urge to look away from the book is irresistible. In one piece, a bullied child contemplates the apocalypse while tracing his legacy of violence and guilt; in another, an artist explores the various madnesses of his wife's forest-dwelling family.

At times, the line between fiction and non-fiction is blurred or even thoroughly erased, with 'dear reader' interjections which work beautifully. The UK's small presses are publishing some of the finest and most unusual writing around and Praying Drunk proves that this is happening in America too.

(Review from The List.)

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked this collection of stories. Totally off the beaten path but refreshing. Obviously a lot of personal experience in these works of fiction, and that's what gave it power. There were some stories that you literally read with a sense of urgency and panic because the author did that good of a job of dragging you along into his world. I also liked all the subtle ways that the stories and characters crossed paths. I was glad the book started with a preface to read them in order and not jump around : ) This book really exemplified why I love the Rumpus book club because I probably wouldn't have selected this for myself.

[Shaindel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kyle Minor's collection of linked short stories/novellas is a powerful must-read. If you haven't yet read his previous collection "In the Devil's Territory," read it first because there are some story tie-ins. I just finished _Praying Drunk_ and am still a little emotionally disoriented from such a spellbinding book. WOW.

[Ayelet Waldman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Terrific stories, but man oh man is it bleak.

[Isabelle Hunt · Rating 5 out of 5]

**I received the book for free through Goodreads First Reads.**

I don't usually like short stories because I like getting to know characters in depth, but I saw that this book was reviewed by Daniel Handler (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket), of whom I am such a big fan, and just had to get it! Fortunately, I won this book and boy am I glad that I did. Each story had different voices, so I could imagine different people telling the story, and I sympathized with every character, although they were usually only there with me for less than 10 pages. Also, the writing is absolutely beautiful - just perfect for short stories. This was my first ever short story collection that I read, and it was an amazing experience. If only I didn't have school, I would have finished this book in a day, not because it's only about 200 pages, but because I just could not have enough. I can't wait to read more written by this author. Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU goodreads for giving me a chance to read this book.

[Hannah H.]

Since Kyle Minor is coming to our creative writing class next week, we were required to read this book. With an initial glance at the title, I was averse to this requirement. Nevertheless, I found some excellent short stories within. "You Shall Go Out With Joy and Be Led Forth With Peace" and "The Truth in All Its Ugly" were my two personal favorites. Minor has a knack for quickly crafting a dynamic cast of characters that are intensely relatable.

The writing on some of the short stories felt taxing to me, however. Perhaps that's just my minimally-educated perspective when it comes to short fiction, but I did find that a few of them had to much "tell" and not enough "show." That led to long blocks of text that were quite unappealing to read. Another thing I really didn't care for, was the foul language and R-rated nature of a couple of these stories. That is personal preference of mine, and clearly the author didn't share the same conviction, but it did spoil my reading a bit.

[Kiersten]

I tried a dozen times to get into this month's Rumpus selection, but I couldn't push past page 50. Mr. Minor is clearly a great writer, but I couldn't really connect to any of his stories. They were a bit too disturbing / unsettling for my own tastes. Not my cup of tea, unfortunately.

[Richard Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Worth it for "The Truth and All Its Ugly," alone. A brilliant storyteller, full of heart and emotion and truth.

[Josiah Hatfield · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection of short stories is sad and bitter and inventive and just a little bit hopeful in a cathartic way.

[Tom Jolly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Picked this up on a whim. Well written and interesting, dark with a sense of hopelessness. Not my usual kind of book. I liked the way the stories were layered with each other.

[Karen Germain · Rating 5 out of 5]

PLOT- Kyle Minor's, Praying Drunk: Stories, is a collection of related tales on the topics of faith, death, and everything else in the universe. It's so much more than I can possibly summarize, so I'm going to stop and jump right into my thoughts.

LIKE- Minor issues an instruction at the start of his collection, the stories are intended to be read in order. Although, they have been previously published as solo works, this collection should be read as a novel. As someone who is excellent at following instructions and hates doing things out of order, I happily complied. What I didn't realize is the brilliance in which Minor has ordered his stories, creating layers of depth.

For example, the reoccurring story of Danny, the nephew who commits suicide, a story that reoccurs at many points in the collection, giving the reader different angles on the same situation. In The Truth and All Its Ugly, the narrator is Danny's father, who admits his own culpability in Danny's death. The father is pill addict, passing along his addiction to Danny, teaching his son to snort pills. In future stories, we hear the scenario from Danny's uncle by marriage, as he sees the fall-out in the family, including attending Danny's very awkward funeral with a minister who uses a baking demonstration to explain the grieving process.

Praying Drunk: Stories, is an incredible collection, but the reoccurring stories of Danny made the biggest impression. I finished the book days ago and I can't stop thinking about it. I believe the reason that they made such an impression, is due to a mind trick that Minor plays with his readers.

His story called Q & A, is set up as a question and answer style interview, and it seems to be that Minor is answering as perhaps himself, or as the creator of a universe, which I took to be a God or maybe a writer (Minor), a god of their own universe of stories. This section guided how I read Minor's entire story collection -

Q: On the cover of this book, it says "Fiction."

A: That's what people write when they want to get away with telling the truth. When they want to convince you of a lie, they dress up some facts and call it "Nonfiction." Either way, people from the past send angry emails.

Does this mean that Danny was real? Did biscuits really get baked at a funeral? This seems too bizarre to be false. We are told this is Fiction, but this section in Q & A, blurs the lines. It's a very automatic human response to want to know if something is real or not, however, should that even matter to the reader? Whether or not Danny was real, this theme is clearly coming from something deep and personal.

Minor's is a gifted writer and I was left with a huge impression of Danny, making him feel very much a real person in my mind. I found this collection to be haunting, chilling, and affecting. It was impossible to put down and refused to leave my mind for days; it's still there.

DISLIKE- Nothing. Just be prepared to be taken to dark places and to be affected. Sobbing may occur.

RECOMMEND- Praying Drunk: Stories, is a must-read. Set aside an afternoon with zero distractions and immerse yourself in Minor's world. Don't skip ahead!

[Greg Zimmerman · Rating 4 out of 5]

(First appeared at: http://www.thenewdorkreviewofbooks.co...)

I picked up this collection of stories by Kyle Minor for a few reasons — first, the title. "Praying Drunk" makes me laugh. Secondly, it's included on Powell's shortlist of the best short story collections of the 21st century (so far) — which, any time a book is mentioned on the same list as Lorrie Moore, David Foster Wallace, and Jhumpa Lahiria, you take note. This one definitely delivered.

The collection starts with two decent stories, but then really gets your attention with the third one, titled "The Truth and All Its Ugly." It's about a drug addict father, who, after his wife leaves him, proceeds to get his teenage son hooked on drugs as well. And then the troubled son blows his brains out to exact revenge on his mother having left them. But, wait! A twist! The father and mother reconcile in their grief, and thankfully, since they'd had their son "scanned" when he was a baby, they're able to buy a clone. But it's just not the same as the real son. It's a crazy story, really fun to read, and probably my favorite in the collection.

The kid who commits suicide reappears in many of the stories in the collection (as does an uncle who also killed himself) — from the minister's sermon at the funeral during which he describes a rockin' biscuit recipe, to the last story, a somewhat solemn piece titled "Lay Me Down in the Bluegrass" that details the suicide's effect on the family. It wasn't truly until this last story that I realized how much I enjoyed this collection, and how well it all fit together.

A long story titled "In a Distant Country" anchors the collection — it's a story told entirely in letters about a evangelical missionary in Haiti who falls in love with and marries a much younger volunteer who has come from Florida. Then, revolution — the Duvalier family flees, and chaos ensues, which turns out poorly for this missionary and his wife. Then story continues in letters to describe the aftermath and the search for the young woman. It's a fascinating, really inventive story.

There's a story about couple told entirely in dialogue where the man is trying to understand the woman's religious devotion. There are stories that are Q&A, one of which is about disillusionment with religion (a theme throughout the whole collection) and the other is a conversation with a guy in heaven — it turns out people do a lot of drinking in heaven.

If you're a fan of quirky, somber, inventive, funny short stories, you'll probably dig this collection, too.

[Mythili · Rating 4 out of 5]

Repetition—of words, phrases, and entire thoughts—is what gives prayer its force, so it’s only fitting that in Praying Drunk, preacher-turned-novelist Kyle Minor uses repetition to deepen the power of his sad, soulful stories. “The Sweet Life” focuses on one specific scene, a funeral with a tone-deaf sermon; “There is Nothing But Sadness in Nashville” identifies the boy, his mother, and his father. They’re variations on the fractured family of “The Truth and All Its Ugly” (only that story is set in 2024, a time when technology gives a grieving father new ways to try to mask his pain by re-living his son’s childhood through a bot). The same boy—or one very much like him—is buried once again in “Lay Me Down in the Blue Grass,” the collection’s final story. If the reader wasn’t mourning him yet, she surely is now.

Part of the reason repetition is so effective in Praying Drunk is because the scenes, characters, and moments that flash past again and again are so searing in the first place. “Another suicide,” is the first sentence of “There is Nothing But Sadness.” But there’s really more than one suicide in that story, and by this point in the collection the reader has watched more than one of these characters die before. Minor’s writing evokes the circling habits of memory itself—the mind’s inability to resist picking up the jagged fragments of a tragedy for inspection again and again.

Fittingly, some of the most marvelous moments in this collection are shaped more like sharp memories than full-on stories, like “First, The Teeth,” in which the narrator visits his dying grandfather in the hospital and struggles to paste in his false teeth. Several stories are built around the recurring character of the menacingly named school bully, Drew McKinnick; in “You Shall Go Out with Joy and Be Led Forth With Peace,” and in “Suspended” he antagonizes the narrator again and again. When Drew McKinnick is nowhere in sight, his brother takes his place. When no McKinnick is around, a snarling cop with that same glinty smile takes up the same role in the narrator’s eyes. The lesson is clear: the habits the mind takes up long outlive memories of the experiences that built those habits in the first place. Better pray.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles...

[Michael Nye · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is Minor's second story collection, and it comes with instructions. In the very beginning, the reader is told to read these stories in order. Don't skip ahead or around. It's not a novel, but one must go through the book chronologically. Why?

This is a collection that is something different for fiction: it's not memoir, it's not exactly a collection, and it's not a novel, but there is an attempt to tie all of these elements together. By reading these stories in order, we experience the "fiction" of the first hundred or so pages, interspersed with interviews of "the author", and then stories that are, it seems, more like nonfiction. How does one read the story about the death of a son in the future when, several dozen pages later, this death seems to be "real"? What difference does it make? What difference should it make?

Minor doesn't answer these questions for you. That's not up to him; as the reader, we make that determination. This makes for a challenging, engaging, artfully rendered work of "fiction" that will have you thinking and feeling the stories for days to come. This is one of the best collections of 2014.

[Nathan Oates · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an astonishing, beautiful, heartbreaking book. The admonition with which it opens - to read the stories in order - seemed strange to me at first, but as I followed the suggestion and moved through the stories the echoes, repetitions, and reverberations accumulated into something that is both more interesting than the narrative accretion of most novels (let alone most story collections), and more they gather together into something more moving and profound than what most fiction of any sort manages to achieve. The stories are honest, direct, and raw, and at the same time the craft - the sentences, the paragraphs, the narrative arc of each piece and the way it connects with those around it - is impeccable. This is without a doubt one of the best books of short stories I've read in years. I was always desperate to get back to reading, to find out where the next story would take us, and I was never disappointed. A brilliant accomplishment.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

What continually astonishes me about the words of Kyle Minor is how much of the discussions of life within religion he's able to fit into a single story. Never feeling cramped or that you're reading forced diatribes each story in Praying Drunk breathes out a search for understanding -- an understanding of past and present placement. The piece Glossolalia is prime example of this. The discussions of the characters not only speak in the language of growing up religion but of the conflicting topics that one faces while steeped in life under crosses. Minor never preaches, well maybe one could gather the interview sections as such a thing, but really they are much more. They are probably closer to being footnotes to the words characters never say. Minor captures voices so few get a chance to truly understand.

[Ian Plenderleith · Rating 4 out of 5]

The drunk, the deadbeat, the abusers and the abused, the adulterous, the deluded, the bereaved and the insane - they're all here, as they are in most US short story collections - although some of these stories deviate to Haiti for a different flavour of misery - the letter exchange of 'In A Different Country' is compelling even if you feel there's little hope of anyone ending up halfway to happiness. One story is called, 'There Is Nothing But Sadness in Nashville', and maybe that will be carved into America's grave after the Zombie Apocalypse.

From that story:
"Another theft. Another embezzlement. A trail of broken promises from LA to Nashville. No reason to say whose story it is or who is telling the story or who went bankrupt or who got evicted, because every visit to Nashville you hear the same stories about different people."

Fine, original writing throughout.

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

In one of the interconnected stories in Kyle Minor’s new collection, the narrator makes a passing reference to the compulsion in some people to make art—even if it’s just playing in a band in some podunk town—in the hopes of being able to make a bunch of strangers “feel something.” I can’t think of a better compliment than to say that Praying Drunk totally succeeds in doing this in the most intelligent, quirky, non-manipulative of ways. Facing a world that’s pretty much bleak and bewildering, Minor’s characters are sometimes defiant, lots of times lost and vulnerable, a few times defeated, but all the time capable of making you feel something. What more could you ask for from stories?

[Mary Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Praying Drunk. I love the way the language bends to its purpose, the way the stories circle round each other. I love the way that nothing works out for good in the end, or maybe some things do, but certainly not everything. I love the puke green locker room, even though I'm not supposed to. I love the ruminations, the imaginations, the language. I love the stories more than I love the characters, and that doesn't happen very often these days. I hope you'll read this book, because then you'll love it too.

[K. · Rating 3 out of 5]

A solid 3 stars.

"A: Maybe the biggest fiction I want to create is that it all matters. It matters so much. It matters and matters."

It was fun to pick out how the stories all fit together, based on characters or events or even just a throwaway line. Some were better than others; "The Truth And All Its Ugly" is a stand-out for me. It has a realistic look at the life of the average poor person in Appalachia (where you "take your medicine through your nose...") that quickly veers into a surreal, Black Mirror-esque universe where you can replicate loved ones if they've died.

[Sean · Rating 4 out of 5]

There was a section of this book, toward the end- a collection of letters telling the story (loosely) of missionaries in Haiti- that I found plodding and I lost interest in it, BUT before and after it was some of the best, most riveting, incendiary writing I've ever read. This book is hard to put down, for the most part, but also written, ingeniously, in a way that you can go through a section then comfortably put it down & return later, knowing you haven't missed anything.

Kyle Minor seems like the kind of author I'd both love to meet and be terrified of talking to in person

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Minor has a talent for emotional moments in his character's lives. Desperate moments, ones that become just as desperate for the reader. With the kind of language that you wouldn't want to cut a word from, Minor creates vividly and manages to make individual stories resonate throughout the others. It's a heck of a book, everything I expected from Minor.

[Jack Shoegazer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just holy shit, really. It took me months to read this, mostly because almost every story left me with its own kind of heartbreak and I had to wait before I could read the next one. It kind of kicked me in the ass, made me wonder a lot about my own writing, if I was putting this much heart and guts in my own work.

[Christian Hamaker · Rating 3 out of 5]

Christ and Pop Culture recommended this collection, so I gave it a shot -- and wish I hadn't bothered. It's not badly written, but I'm not sure what it has to offer people of faith. Brokenness, shot after shot at the church (fundamentalism in particular, because, c'mon, it's an easy target) -- it's like Internet/social-media culture re: relgion in print form, but with more eloquence.

[Sleepless Dreamer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't understand this but this book has proven a book can be both incredibly enlightening and bleak and that I can finish a book without understanding a word yet feeling like I understood everything.

[Monica · Rating 1 out of 5]

I gave up after the 4th chapter. Wasn't my cup of tea.