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A Working Man’s Apocrypha: Short Stories
Cutting-edge fiction that breathes life into unlikely characters
In these unforgettable stories, William Luvaas depicts the struggles of everyday people facing situations far from the ordinary. Through tales set largely in Southern California’s Inland Empire, Luvaas weaves magic and absurdity around characters caught between apocalypse and heartbreak. Deftly spinning haunting plots, he conveys the joys and misfortunes of folks who confront trauma or loss and find unexpected opportunities for survival.
Here is nature run amok: A tornado whirls away a man’s wife and daughter, but they return midway into his ensuing romantic affair. Flood survivors in California’s coastal range build makeshift arks in anticipation of the world’s watery end. Other stories fathom relationships, as a diabetic’s suicide in the title story renews a cycle of unrequited love, or aging twins reconcile with the loss of their childhood intimacy. All come to grips with contemporary problems: poverty, disease, or powerlessness in the face of economic inequality, religious fanaticism, and corporate greed.
Common to all of these tales is a sense of something longed for...just out of reach. Characters are tested, often in unexpected ways, and generally arrive at some epiphany about themselves and the world they inhabit. Death is regularly a presence here, literally or figuratively, and hyperbole a common refrain, suggesting that inexplicable and wondrous forces are at work behind human fate.
Whether writing from the point of view of a semiliterate handyman or an elderly woman facing death on a cold night, Luvaas delivers stories, characters, and voices that are the stuff of cutting-edge fiction. A Working Man’s Apocrypha is masterful storytelling that will leave readers breathless.
“In these brilliant stories, many set in…the Inland Empire (‘Mount San Gorgonio to the north, the San Jacintos due east, fractured, faceted with severe late afternoon light’), laws of nature are often broken. Floods, tornadoes and other disasters inspire varied means of survival; death sparks new relationships. A brother and sister, twins, remember how they drifted apart. An artist recalls the practical wisdom of a man who worked for her: ‘Nayls go in coffee cans” and “Don’t trust brite moonlyt nun thatl mess you up evrah time you don’t wach yoresef. It cud make a dam dum crippuled up dibettuck want to go dansing.’”
Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Luvaas’s stories inform us of mortal wounds while fascinating us with the instruments of character and fate that inflict them. An excellent read.”
- WILLIAM PITT ROOT, author of The Storm and Other Poems
“A master of metaphor, of character and imagination, Luvaas takes the reader on odysseys every bit as compelling as those of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or J.M. Coetzee. I was enchanted and moved by these stories, some of which are bound to become classics.”
- PAMELA USCHUK, author of Without Birds, Without Flowers, Without Trees and One-Legged Dancer
“An absorbing collection by a writer to keep your eye on.”
- EDITH PEARLMAN, author of Love among the Greats and How to Fall
“In these fierce and eloquent stories, William Luvaas turns ordinary situations into extraordinary and haunting encounters that you won’t soon forget.”
- ALAN DAVIS, author of Alone with the Owl
“Luvaas manages to make such swerving and impossible lives feel utterly true and real and maybe–incredibly–even normal.
- Linda Swanson-Davies, Co-Editor Glimmer Train
“In this short story collection, tornados real and metaphorical rip through the lives of not-so-ordinary people, flinging them into unexpected intimacies and tearing away identities once thought airtight. Luvaas’ poetic prose is powerful as the Santa Ana winds, yet delicate enough to limn the silences that speak louder than words, as in the title story, where the bond between a widow and her dying handyman is too profound to risk actual words of love.”
- Jendi Reiter, posted on Winning Writers Website
“Luvaas truly gets how connected people can be, how a person’s emotions are tied inextricably to their intimates, whether lovers, friends or family; how people joust, banter, joke and tease, pushing and pulling, claiming their space....Luvaas is determined to grant each character their full humanity, their full dignity, even when their circumstances would make most of us turn away from the pain and struggle... in these brilliant, funny, heart-breaking stories.”
- Glenn Raucher, Introduction to The Writers Voice reading in New York
“Luvaas’s poetic prose is magic, his story “Rain” drew me immediately in, before the first drop fell, and then it held me captive to the chilling end. This is writing at its best!”
- Virginia Howard, Editor of Thema
“William Luvaas shows a sophistication and honesty in his writing that is both rare and engag...
In these unforgettable stories, William Luvaas depicts the struggles of everyday people facing situations far from the ordinary. Through tales set largely in Southern California’s Inland Empire, Luvaas weaves magic and absurdity around characters caught between apocalypse and heartbreak. Deftly spinning haunting plots, he conveys the joys and misfortunes of folks who confront trauma or loss and find unexpected opportunities for survival.
Here is nature run amok: A tornado whirls away a man’s wife and daughter, but they return midway into his ensuing romantic affair. Flood survivors in California’s coastal range build makeshift arks in anticipation of the world’s watery end. Other stories fathom relationships, as a diabetic’s suicide in the title story renews a cycle of unrequited love, or aging twins reconcile with the loss of their childhood intimacy. All come to grips with contemporary problems: poverty, disease, or powerlessness in the face of economic inequality, religious fanaticism, and corporate greed.
Common to all of these tales is a sense of something longed for...just out of reach. Characters are tested, often in unexpected ways, and generally arrive at some epiphany about themselves and the world they inhabit. Death is regularly a presence here, literally or figuratively, and hyperbole a common refrain, suggesting that inexplicable and wondrous forces are at work behind human fate.
Whether writing from the point of view of a semiliterate handyman or an elderly woman facing death on a cold night, Luvaas delivers stories, characters, and voices that are the stuff of cutting-edge fiction. A Working Man’s Apocrypha is masterful storytelling that will leave readers breathless.
“In these brilliant stories, many set in…the Inland Empire (‘Mount San Gorgonio to the north, the San Jacintos due east, fractured, faceted with severe late afternoon light’), laws of nature are often broken. Floods, tornadoes and other disasters inspire varied means of survival; death sparks new relationships. A brother and sister, twins, remember how they drifted apart. An artist recalls the practical wisdom of a man who worked for her: ‘Nayls go in coffee cans” and “Don’t trust brite moonlyt nun thatl mess you up evrah time you don’t wach yoresef. It cud make a dam dum crippuled up dibettuck want to go dansing.’”
Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Luvaas’s stories inform us of mortal wounds while fascinating us with the instruments of character and fate that inflict them. An excellent read.”
- WILLIAM PITT ROOT, author of The Storm and Other Poems
“A master of metaphor, of character and imagination, Luvaas takes the reader on odysseys every bit as compelling as those of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or J.M. Coetzee. I was enchanted and moved by these stories, some of which are bound to become classics.”
- PAMELA USCHUK, author of Without Birds, Without Flowers, Without Trees and One-Legged Dancer
“An absorbing collection by a writer to keep your eye on.”
- EDITH PEARLMAN, author of Love among the Greats and How to Fall
“In these fierce and eloquent stories, William Luvaas turns ordinary situations into extraordinary and haunting encounters that you won’t soon forget.”
- ALAN DAVIS, author of Alone with the Owl
“Luvaas manages to make such swerving and impossible lives feel utterly true and real and maybe–incredibly–even normal.
- Linda Swanson-Davies, Co-Editor Glimmer Train
“In this short story collection, tornados real and metaphorical rip through the lives of not-so-ordinary people, flinging them into unexpected intimacies and tearing away identities once thought airtight. Luvaas’ poetic prose is powerful as the Santa Ana winds, yet delicate enough to limn the silences that speak louder than words, as in the title story, where the bond between a widow and her dying handyman is too profound to risk actual words of love.”
- Jendi Reiter, posted on Winning Writers Website
“Luvaas truly gets how connected people can be, how a person’s emotions are tied inextricably to their intimates, whether lovers, friends or family; how people joust, banter, joke and tease, pushing and pulling, claiming their space....Luvaas is determined to grant each character their full humanity, their full dignity, even when their circumstances would make most of us turn away from the pain and struggle... in these brilliant, funny, heart-breaking stories.”
- Glenn Raucher, Introduction to The Writers Voice reading in New York
“Luvaas’s poetic prose is magic, his story “Rain” drew me immediately in, before the first drop fell, and then it held me captive to the chilling end. This is writing at its best!”
- Virginia Howard, Editor of Thema
“William Luvaas shows a sophistication and honesty in his writing that is both rare and engag...
224 pages, Hardcover
First published September 14, 2007
5 people want to read
About the author
William Luvaas
12 books5 followersWilliam 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 18, 2007
In lesser hands, the character aspects that Williams Luvaas so uncannily communicates throughout A Working Man's Apocrypha, meticulous detail that provides us with telling insights, would come across as mere quirks, harmless eccentricities, without substance. But all his characters, no matter how briefly they appear within, contribute something essential to the stories, and Bill paints them fully, with vibrant, tactile detail, filling our senses in ways that most writers cannot in the environs of a short story.
All over AWMA Bill makes the natural world as much of a character as the people within. In "Original Sin" it's "Fog creeping up along empty streets, ambushing buildings..." action that directly reflects the emotional state of our protagonist. In "The Woman Who Was Allergic to Herself,” it's "the wind was brutal this morning. It decapitated waves and sent them skittering, throwing white spume in the air and leaves down in a steady rain..." How there he makes the leaves into water, mixing elements to better give us a sense of the confusion of the physical moment, here and elsewhere, how things physically come apart; things, and people, too.
And he truly gets how profoundly connected people can be, how a person's emotions are tied inextricably to their intimates, whether lovers, friends or family; how people joust, banter, joke and tease, pushing and pulling, claiming their space. In "The Sexual Revolution," he writes of twins, who share a preternaturally unusual bond, even for twins. Bill writes "How and Hol were like taut piano wires side by side; a vibration begun in one invariably translated to the other." In the end, they part, aware of themselves as individuals, perhaps for the first time; that necessary cleaving, yet also fundamentally aware of what is lost.
I could make the rest of this introduction an anthology of my favorites parts of this book, the original use of language, how Bill makes the characters explicitly specific, utterly colloquial, yet never clichéd, how he uses phrases like "whumped it flat," describes the day-to-day difficulties of living as "life's pesterups," or a violent occurrence as taking place in "a few thick seconds," but we'd be here all night, as that covers exactly one page. Just know that the language never takes you further out, away from the heart of the story. It always-always--draws you further in.
Especially in the two stories that to me make up the heart of the collection, "The Woman Who Was Allergic to Herself" and the towering and devastating title story, Bill is determined to grant each character their full humanity, their full dignity, even when their circumstances would make most of us turn away from the pain and struggle, and if they were happening to us, to surrender. And the joy in much of “AWMA” is observing each character gauge and reckon their own condition; tentatively moving forward, pulling away, questioning their own motives and actions, and finally, in most of the cases, making the inevitable, yet invariably brave step, to recognize something of themselves in everyone, good and bad. And conversely, in so many of the stories, our main characters are returned a piece of themselves in the bargain, in startling and stunning ways, (sometimes even with a hammer upside the head), finally seeing things through new eyes, as we see them fresh and vivid in these brilliant, funny, heart-breaking stories...
All over AWMA Bill makes the natural world as much of a character as the people within. In "Original Sin" it's "Fog creeping up along empty streets, ambushing buildings..." action that directly reflects the emotional state of our protagonist. In "The Woman Who Was Allergic to Herself,” it's "the wind was brutal this morning. It decapitated waves and sent them skittering, throwing white spume in the air and leaves down in a steady rain..." How there he makes the leaves into water, mixing elements to better give us a sense of the confusion of the physical moment, here and elsewhere, how things physically come apart; things, and people, too.
And he truly gets how profoundly connected people can be, how a person's emotions are tied inextricably to their intimates, whether lovers, friends or family; how people joust, banter, joke and tease, pushing and pulling, claiming their space. In "The Sexual Revolution," he writes of twins, who share a preternaturally unusual bond, even for twins. Bill writes "How and Hol were like taut piano wires side by side; a vibration begun in one invariably translated to the other." In the end, they part, aware of themselves as individuals, perhaps for the first time; that necessary cleaving, yet also fundamentally aware of what is lost.
I could make the rest of this introduction an anthology of my favorites parts of this book, the original use of language, how Bill makes the characters explicitly specific, utterly colloquial, yet never clichéd, how he uses phrases like "whumped it flat," describes the day-to-day difficulties of living as "life's pesterups," or a violent occurrence as taking place in "a few thick seconds," but we'd be here all night, as that covers exactly one page. Just know that the language never takes you further out, away from the heart of the story. It always-always--draws you further in.
Especially in the two stories that to me make up the heart of the collection, "The Woman Who Was Allergic to Herself" and the towering and devastating title story, Bill is determined to grant each character their full humanity, their full dignity, even when their circumstances would make most of us turn away from the pain and struggle, and if they were happening to us, to surrender. And the joy in much of “AWMA” is observing each character gauge and reckon their own condition; tentatively moving forward, pulling away, questioning their own motives and actions, and finally, in most of the cases, making the inevitable, yet invariably brave step, to recognize something of themselves in everyone, good and bad. And conversely, in so many of the stories, our main characters are returned a piece of themselves in the bargain, in startling and stunning ways, (sometimes even with a hammer upside the head), finally seeing things through new eyes, as we see them fresh and vivid in these brilliant, funny, heart-breaking stories...
February 10, 2017
Low-key, matter-of-fact tales of often improbable situations: a woman gets whisked away by the wind but still sends her neighbor hateful email; a couple dies in a car crash but keep on with their lives anyway. The prose is lyrical, yet not overdone. Several stories take place in and around Palm Springs.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews