Special Election: Stories

by Brock Clarke

With his tenth book, celebrated author Brock Clarke once again demonstrates his mastery of the story form.

In Special Election, ingenious fictions target our all-too-familiar preoccupations and vulnerabilities—belonging, (dis)engagement, the struggle for self-worth, the difficulty of loving and being loved, the banality and absurdity of existence. Brock Clarke’s rapier wit, inexhaustible imagination, and brilliant leaps of illogic transform his characters’ desperation and distress into tragicomic delight. In the title story, Lawrence Welk is ousted from heaven to run for governor in present-day North Dakota. In “One Goes Where One Is Needed,” we follow the former Provisional Coalition Administrator of post-liberation Iraq, now a youth ski instructor at Okemo Mountain in Vermont. In “The Slim Jim,” the protagonist finds himself (literally and figuratively) very slowly choking to death on a frozen microwavable burrito.

“There is something wrong with me,” states the narrator of “The Big Book of Useless Saturdays.” This could be said of all the characters in Special Election, and through loopy misdirection and mordant observation, Clarke devotes himself to showing his characters and his readers exactly what is wrong. Yet the sharpness of his attention and lavish ludicrousness of his storylines belie a sneaking affection for this imperfect, disappointing world filled with imperfect, disappointing humans. Though Clarke has been compared to such greats as Barthelme, Bellow, and Saunders, the nine stories in Special Election vibrate at a frequency all his own, showcasing the strengths of one of our most gifted comic writers.

216 pages, Paperback

Published September 15, 2025

About the author

Brock Clarke is the author of seven books of fiction, most recently a collection of short stories, The Price of the Haircut. His novels include The Happiest People in the World, Exley (which was a Kirkus Book of the Year, a finalist for the Maine Book Award, and a longlist finalist for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award), and An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England (which was a national bestseller, and American Library Associate Notable Book of the Year, a #1 Book Sense Pick, a Borders Original Voices in Fiction selection, and a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice pick). His books have been reprinted in a dozen international editions, and have been awarded the Mary McCarthy Prize for Fiction, the Prairie Schooner Book Series Prize, a National Endowment for Arts Fellowship, and an Ohio Council for the Arts Fellowship, among others.

Clarke’s individual stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Boston Globe, Virginia Quarterly Review, One Story, The Believer, Georgia Review, New England Review, Southern Review, and have appeared in the annual Pushcart Prize and New Stories from the South anthologies, and on NPR’s Selected Shorts.

Clarke lives in Portland, Maine and teaches creative writing at Bowdoin College and in The University of Tampa’s low residency MFA program.

Reviews

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't read a lot of short story collections, but I really enjoyed Special Election. This was a Christmas gift from my aunt and Brock Clarke is a faculty member at Bowdoin, where I work. The stories in here are darkly funny and - at times - biting critiques of our times and society. Stylistically and thematically they felt pretty cohesive.

The standout to me was Reckonings, which dives the virtual worlds we live in and isolate ourselves in, with sometimes (most times?) tragic real world consequences. This story and really all of them seemed to be dealing with the themes of the most thought-provoking film I saw last year: 'Eddington'. These stories and that film are taking a magnifying glass to our contemporary society and how it's been warped by our overwhelming physical and social isolation while at the same time being more 'connected' to strangers than ever before. Good stuff!

[Caleb Michael Sarvis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Admittedly, I was a little disheartened when I started reading this new collection from Brock Clarke (don't mistakenly take the E from his last name and add it to his first name). His deadpan prose can feel a little silly, and thus suggest something vapid about the story.

But that is not the case. Not at all. By the end of each piece I felt a sharp squeeze in my diaphragm, because Brock managed to capture something ghostly and true.

I've said this before, but Brock Clarke's writing has a Coen Brothers sensibility to it. To read his work is to be reminded of Fargo and the like.

I laughed. I commiserated. I wished for more.

[Alison · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's an anything-goes energy here, a brilliant and deeply funny truth-telling.