The Three Devils: And Other Stories

by William Luvaas

182 pages, Paperback

Published January 14, 2025

About the author

William Luvaas has published four novels, The Seductions of Natalie Bach (Little, Brown), Going Under (Putnam), Beneath The Coyote Hills, and the recently-released Welcome To Saint Angel, and two story collections: A Working Man’s Apocrypha and Ashes Rain Down: A Story Cycle–Huffington Post’s 2013 Book of the Year and a finalist for The Next Generation Indie Book Awards (Short Story)--and has edited an anthology of California writers: Into The Deep End. Luvaas has received fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, the Ludwig Vogelstein and Edward Albee foundations, and has won Glimmer Train’s Fiction Open Contest, The Ledge Magazine’s Fiction Competition, and Fiction Network’s 2nd National Fiction Competition. His screenplay for Welcome To Saint Angel was awarded Best Adapted Screenplay at the Golden State Film Festival (2018). His articles, essays and over 50 stories have appeared widely, including in American Fiction, Antioch Review, Blackbird, Cosmopolitan, Glimmer Train, Grain Magazine, North American Review, Short Story, The Sun, Texas Review, The Village Voice & The Washington Post Book World. Ten of his stories have been nominated for The Pushcart Prize. Going Under was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and A Working Man’s Apocrypha was nominated for the 2008 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He is is online fiction editor for Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts.

Luvaas’s novels and stories focus on people coping with adversity under difficult circumstances. An apocalyptic wind often blows through his work. Glimmer Train Co-editor, Linda Swanson-Davies, says of his characters: “He manages to make such swerving and impossible lives feel utterly true...even normal.”

Luvaas graduated cum laude from the University of California, Berkeley, and was a student activist. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from San Diego State University. He was the first VISTA Volunteer in Alabama, working for civil rights and economic justice. He has taught creative writing at San Diego State University, U.C.-Riverside, The Writer’s Voice in New York and The UCLA Writing Program. He has worked as a carpenter, pipe maker, window washer, freelance journalist, and Fiction Coordinator for New York State Poets in Public Service. Luvaas has lived in England, Israel, and Spain, and for a year in a primitive cabin he built in a giant stump in the Mendocino County redwoods. He now lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Lucinda, a painter and film maker.

Reviews

[Pam · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love apocalyptic movies, stories, and books, and The Three Devils and Other Stories by William Luvaas hit the spot. What happens when a virus comes and kills most of humanity? The story, The Three Devils, is the longest short story in the book, and the first. It follows a few neighbors and how they are getting by after a major pandemic. I could ‘see’ the story so well in my mind, Luvaas is a terrific writer.

While these stories are about the possible end of humankind as we know it, they weren’t without hope. Which I appreciated. One of my favorite quotes was,

“When the future becomes an inverted question mark, it’s hard to sustain hope. But hard to go on without it.”

And isn’t that the truth?

So if you’re an apocalyptic fan like me, read this imaginative, but not so far-fetched from reality, book today!

***I received a free copy of this book from the author. All thoughts and opinions are my own.***