Half-Burnt

by Peter Grandbois

Peter Grandbois writes with uncommon beauty and marvelous care about the deepest complexities of history and heart. Half-Burnt is filled with love and truth and pain and rage and endurance and desire. It’s about false endings and true beginnings and all the jagged mysteries that attend the human journey. I’m so glad I read it.
Laird Hunt , author of In the House in the Dark of the Woods This is a novel where fiction, myth, and historical reality intertwine with ponderous lyrical force. Told as a lucid dream, the story cycles from one mouth to another, from the dead to the living, unraveling like a river and piercing like an arrow. Peter Grandbois creates a splendid sense of otherworldliness echoing Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo. We face vengeance, desire, possessing spirits, and the question of belonging to a primordial earth, a story as ancient and vivid as the touch of man. And at the end of the novel, we can do nothing but marvel at the brilliant feat and thank Grandbois for his courage.
Jorge Armenteros , author of The Roar of the River

278 pages, Paperback

Published June 25, 2019

About the author

Peter Grandbois is the author of fifteen books, including: The Gravedigger, selected by Barnes and Noble for its “Discover Great New Writers” program, The Arsenic Lobster: A Hybrid Memoir, chosen as one of the top five memoirs of 2009 by the Sacramento News and Review, Nahoonkara, winner of the gold medal in literary fiction in Foreword magazine's Book of the Year Awards for 2011, a collection of surreal flash fictions, Domestic Disturbances, a finalist for Book of the Year in Foreword magazine’s 2013 awards, three novella collections or “monster double features,” Wait Your Turn, The Glob Who Girdled Granville (Honorable Mention for Best Fantasy of 2014 in the IndieFab Awards), The Girl on the Swing (Silver Medalist for Best Fantasy of 2015 in the IndieFab Awards), the poetry collection, This House That (Honorable Mention for Best Poetry Collection in the INDIES Awards 2017), the memoir in essays, Kissing the Lobster, the novel, half-burnt (Finalist for Best Multicultural Fiction in the INDIES Awards, 2019), the poetry collections The Three-Legged World, Everything Has Become Birds, and the Snyder Prize winning poetry collection, Last Night I Aged a Hundred Years, a collection of fictions entitled Domestic Bestiary, and a novel/novella monster double feature, Cat People and Dream Memories of the Fifty Foot Woman. His poems, essays, and short stories have appeared in over one hundred magazines and been shortlisted for both the Pushcart Prize and Best American Essays. His plays have been performed in St. Louis, Columbus, Los Angeles, and New York. He is the Poetry Editor at Boulevard magazine and teaches at Denison University in Ohio.