How

by Geoff Wyss

If every story is born of a question—How did we get here? How do you make your arm do that?—the stories in Geoff Wyss’s How search for answers to the mysteries of an astonishing range of characters. The narrator of “How I Come to Be Here at the GasFast” explains why he hasn’t left a truck stop in the two days since he scratched a winning lottery ticket. In “How to Be a Winner,” a sports consultant browbeats a high school football team with his theory of history and a justification of his failed coaching career. Lost in the mazes they’ve made of themselves, Wyss’s characters search for exits on ground that shifts dizzyingly from humor to pathos, from cynicism to earnestness, from comedy to tragedy, often within the same sentence. Although propelled by a razor-sharp, contemporary voice, Wyss’s stories—many set in a New Orleans unknown to television and tourists—have more in common with Chekhov and O’Connor than with “Treme.”

131 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 7, 2012

About the author

Geoff Wyss’s book of short stories, How, won the Ohio State Fiction Prize. His novel, Tiny Clubs, was published in 2007. Wyss's fiction has appeared in New Stories from the South 2006 and 2009, Tin House, Glimmer Train, Image, and many others. He lives in New Orleans and can be reached at geoffwyss@hotmail.com