Surviving Jersey: Danger & Insanity in The Garden State

by Scott Loring Sanders

This is not your average New Jersey a circus tiger attack, a schoolmate’s abduction, heartbreaking addicts, and a blind bad-ass granny. Scott Loring Sanders’ suburban adolescence overflowed with bone-crushing water slides, hitchhiking serial killers, a chilling collision in a ‘71 Impala. From his tough, complex father to Sanders’ own reckoning of fatherhood and alcohol, SURVIVING JERSEY is a tour-de-force exploration of the risks that shaped a generation.

215 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 3, 2017

About the author

Scott Loring Sanders is the author of four books. Two novels, The Hanging Woods and Gray Baby (both with Houghton Mifflin), a short story collection-- Shooting Creek and Other Stories (Down & Out Books), and an essay collection-- Surviving Jersey: Danger & Insanity in the Garden State. His work has been included in Best American Mystery Stories, Noted in Best American Essays, and published widely in national journals and anthologies. He's a frequent contributor to Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, among many others. He's been the Writer-in-Residence at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France, and also a fellow at the Edward F. Albee Foundation in Montauk, NY. After growing up in New Jersey and then living in Virginia for twenty-five years, he now resides in Cambridge, MA and teaches creative writing at Emerson College and Lesley University. He is currently at work on a new novel of literary mystery/suspense set in Concord, Massachusetts.

For more information, visit his website at http://www.scottloringsanders.com

Reviews

[Clifford · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a terrific collection of personal essays that have the most important ingredients for work of this kind: honesty and self-awareness. At times shocking, the stories the author tells about growing up, about his wilder days as a drinker before he made the decision to take control of his life, are powerful. And yet while he never adopts a preaching tone--it seems clear that he is NOT writing these pieces to proselytize for sobriety--there is still a lesson here. He's talking about survival techniques that worked for him, and it makes for an exciting, and sometimes moving, read.