Stealing Away: Stories

by Kevin Revolinski

“It was the summer before senior year when Danny and I decided the adults in our lives had irredeemably failed us, and so we hit the road.” A high-school runaway; two orphans with a battered canteen and a dead dog in the Mexican desert; a bookkeeper obsessed with a murder photo; a man haunted by a childhood tragedy. Whether returning to small-town homes or getting lost in the souks of Syria, the characters in these twelve stories struggle to find purpose and choose between escape and making peace with their lots. “Whatever scene Revolinski drops his reader into, you feel like you are really there.”

“STEALING AWAY is a lush, shimmering collection... A fantastic debut... Revolinski proves with this book that he has incredible range, wisdom, and empathy.” — Nickolas Butler, author of Shotgun Lovesongs and Little Faith

“With the insight of a world traveler and the heart of a kind Midwestern neighbor, Revolinski's dark, engrossing stories find flickers of hope in a disorienting world. He has a knack for realistic dialogue and an empathetic heart for Midwestern folks on the harder edge of ‘working class.’” — J. Ryan Stradal, author of The Lager Queen of Minnesota

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

247 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 19, 2021

About the author

The award-winning author of Stealing Away: Stories, Kevin Revolinski is the Mad Traveler based in Madison, Wisconsin. His articles and photography have appeared in The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Sydney Morning Herald and Miami Herald. He is the author of 16 books, including various Wisconsin/Midwest travel, outdoors and beer guides and a memoir about his year living in Turkey: The Yogurt Man Cometh. He has lived in Panama, Guatemala, Turkey, Italy and Thailand, and has visited 75+ countries. Stealing Away is a collection of twelve short stories. He is currently at work on a novel and a travel memoir about his time in Reggio Calabria, Italy. See his work at The Mad Traveler https://www.themadtraveler.com and https://KevinRevolinski.com

Reviews

[Kevin Revolinski · Rating 5 out of 5]

**2021 PenCraft Book Award Winner**
**Editor's Pick from Publishers Weekly's BookLife** (https://booklife.com/projectid/fe27a5...)
“Revolinski’s twelve engrossing short stories center on characters attempting to make peace with the past while navigating tense relationships and uncertain futures. Most of these folks feel familiar enough to come from any Midwestern town, though some also inhabit Turkey, Peru and other international locations: a woman stuck in a boring job and a withering marriage; a grandfather who holds the distinction of being the oldest resident in his county; a man who returns to his childhood neighborhood in an attempt to understand the tragedy that unraveled his group of friends. Told by curious, no-nonsense narrators who for the most part seem weathered yet reliable, the stories are rich with immersive description and offer fresh insights on familiar themes, including the way trauma and a lack of genuine connection can change people.

In the title story, two teenagers plot to escape their unstable families and dead-end town by “selling” their car repeatedly on Craigslist, only to steal it back in the middle of the night. Unsurprisingly, this scam does not end well–but the real soul of the piece lies in the female narrator’s growing understanding of her complicated relationship with her troubled mother. In “Picking Blueberries”–another standout–a middle-aged man in a small town where “even the church doesn’t feel whole” reflects on his grandfather’s mortality: “Despite his years, he never had that air of waiting to die, but rather waiting for something that never comes …Work defined him, and without it he sank into moments of nonbeing. It was painful to watch.”

In this debut collection, Revolinski–an accomplished food and travel writer and memoirist– proves a keen observer of place, people, and the human condition, particularly the inner turmoil and ennui that accompany coming to terms with life’s harsh realities while still looking with a degree of hope for whatever comes next.

Takeaway: An enthralling, empathetic collection of stories about attempting to make peace with the past while facing uncertain futures.

Great for fans of: Ann Packer, Charles Baxter.

Nickolas Butler, author of Shotgun Lovesongs and Little Faith
“STEALING AWAY is a lush, shimmering collection, at once globe-trotting and far-afield, and also somehow as intimate and quotidian as any small hometown. Revolinski, an accomplished non-fiction writer, proves with this book that he has incredible range, wisdom, and empathy. I raced through this collection of short stories and can’t wait to read more of Revolinski’s fiction. A fantastic debut.”

J. Ryan Stradal, author of The Lager Queen of Minnesota
“With the insight of a world traveler and the heart of a kind Midwestern neighbor, Revolinski's dark, engrossing stories find flickers of hope in a disorienting world. He has a knack for realistic dialogue and an empathetic heart for Midwestern folks on the harder edge of ‘working class.’”

Sarah Cords, Citizen Reader
“I love Revolinski’s way of writing female characters, which doesn’t belittle them or simply make them objects to look at, but truly makes them fleshed-out human characters with not always predictable motives and actions of their own... He has a nice touch with description, and whatever scene he drops his reader into (and the locations here are not exclusively in the Midwest), you feel like you are really there...”

[Sarah Cords · Rating 5 out of 5]

At last, a book that gets the Midwest right.

And I don’t mean the “Midwest” that appears in most published literary fiction. I mean the actual Midwest, complete with houses containing furniture bought at St. Vincent de Paul, both interstates and tiny country backroads, Wal-marts, and gravel driveways. Author Kevin Revolinski has a nice touch with description, and whatever scene he drops his reader into (and the locations here are not exclusively in the Midwest), you feel like you are really there.

The stories are realistic and clear-eyed, but even when things start to turn ugly, they don’t always end that way (and Revolinski doesn’t dwell on ugliness just for the sake of doing so, which this reader appreciates).

I only get the chance to read at night, when I’m worn out, and each time I picked up this book I still had to read to the end of whatever story I’d started, no matter how tired I was. Each story is strong in its own way, but I particularly enjoyed the very short story “Maple Seeds.” It is about one small moment between a man and a woman who don’t know each other, but who are aware of one another anyway. I love Revolinski’s way of writing female characters, which doesn’t belittle them or simply make them objects to look at, but truly makes them fleshed-out human characters with not always predictable motives and actions of their own.

I found these accessible, very readable, but still very thoughtful stories, and I thoroughly enjoyed the read. The author is also a travel writer and blogger, and his attention to the details and nuance of place and landscape is shown off to very good effect here.

[Jeffrey Todd · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a remarkable book. Revo takes you to places far afield but somehow familiar. What a facility with language. Simple, basic and yet intricate and nuanced. Emotive stories. Revo is a Mad Traveler, a Renaissance Man and Beau Vivant who delights in sharing what he knows. Enjoy the read!

[Julio Carlos · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book starts off great, with a little bit of humour and sarcasm on the first story, with a very good progression and implications.


The dry humour and sarcasm is definitely a GREAT trait of this book, Kevin Revolinski should get the award for the most sarcastic writer in the planet. It’s just flawless, and the way it makes you want to read the story while listening some jazz on the background is something very nice. You don’t get in this day and age, many writers with this “non-challans“, better yet, totally uninterested vibe of narrative. It’s very cool, and the fact that Kevin Revolinski could keep the reading experience light and amusing, slightly gripping, is impressive.

The first story, Stealing Away, is about two youngsters that run away from their houses, Bony and Clyde* style, and try to survive by making petty crimes. What’s interesting about this story is that it shows a LOT of the reality of most americans live and it’s not passed on the media. They both lived under financially struggling parents, with low education, one of them lived with a single parent after a “run-for-it” from the house, and both apparently didn’t have much of an education. So, here we have two youngsters, distressed by lack of money, and leaving a track of crimes on their wake while naively hanging to the certainty that everything will be fine.

There’s so much skill in the writings of Kevin that one can only notice if paid very close attention, like when he says: “There was anger, sure, but it faltered like a fluorescent bulb flickering as it couldn’t hold the light. I saw anxiety and fear in the darkness between”, I mean, HOLY MONOPOLY, THAT, is something that takes a lot to get right. Breath-taking! Stealing away, the short story, is very emotional on the sense of family and the despair of slowly losing those who you love, or growing up to realize that they aren’t the heroes, you thought they were, in a sense, yet, in the end, realizing that you should’ve listened to them, because life isn’t as easy as they thought it would be


The diversity and reach of these stories are amazing both in wide as in depth. Stories about bullies and dealing with them, the power of preparedness, the cost of silly mistakes and harshness and the power of regret, all of it told in a cool, dark, straight-up and almost lyrical style of this amazing writer that is Kevin Revolinski.

Harsh realities and observations are sprinkled on the book with quite frequency, done in an always surprising, unexpected way and actually whenever the perfect opportunity to do it arises. Kevin does not miss a beat. Excellent stuff right here.

La Gatita is very cool, not for its Latino-flavour per se, but for the very well prepared mixture of moral lessons, honour, boundaries, opportunities and the sensuality of despair.

Mosaic, one of the stories is an entrancing piece that really shows the skill of the author. It’s complex, subjective, dry, sensual, grips the senses and perceptions of wrong and right, the human urges and the wildness of one in want, desiring and the secretive life that some cultures, specially Arabic cultures force onto women. It’s a piece that will make you think, imagine and lose yourself on. GREAT Job by Kevin.

One of the highest traits of these stories are the imageries that each create on us readers, given just enough detail for them to be vivid and powerful, yet letting, allowing the reader to make most of the “decisions” when it comes to the pictures we choose increasing the engagement we have with this wonderful collection of short stories.

Kevin’s stories aren’t predictable in any shape or form. The plot is always hidden by his narrative style and not enough information of normally expected nuances of the past, or future are given in order to aid us to figure out what is going to happen. The stories, kept in the present tense, mostly, as the narrator simply states the events without interferences or inputs, to the point that we don’t even know how the characters look like sometimes, all we are given are the main features, when relevant, and that’s one of the reasons these stories are so good!

I enjoyed myself while immersed on the stories of this collection and would actually read it again and again, as they seem timeless.


Kevin comes up with gems such as “Her voice was a feather brushing a smooth surface“, and many other GREAT little insinuations and remarks from the narrator while giving us EXTREMELY cultural diverse stories, ranging from Turkey to the Caribbean’s, a little of the Mexican culture, and much, MUCH more in so few pages. It’s amazing and enriching.

Pros:
Deep stories, all of them with meaning and mystery
EXCELLENT use of sarcasm
The flow of the narrative and the atmosphere it creates in EVERY single story, is sublime
Kevin brings a style of narrative that is almost being forgotten, and to read an author daring to use it again is refreshing
The cultural approaches and spectrum is outstanding!
LOVVVEEEEE the way Kevin makes you think from a new angle everyday situations
The dry humour is impeccable
Kevin offers us GEMS with his dry remarks, I looooooooooooooooved it! I will read this collection again, for sure.

Cons:
None.

Favourite stories: Stealing Away, Butcher Boys, Mosaic, La Gatita, Small Hope Bay, Thirst.

Cover Score: 7.3/10

Book Score: 8.6/10

Original Review @ - https://scribblesworth.wordpress.com/...

[Monique · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great little book of 12 short stories. The title of the book is also the title of one of the stories. However, it became apparent to me that "stealing away" was not just a physical activity, but sometimes a mental or psychological event, depending on which story one reads. A very worthwhile read!

[Andy Ravenscroft · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short story collections are interesting animals. In a literary world that is still dominated by the novel, and even more by the trilogy and its cousin who just won't shut up, the series, it's difficult for short stories to make an impression. And yet in good hands with a fresh perspective they can make for some of the best reads. Stealing Away meets both of those criteria, and for the most part the writing is very good indeed. There's one exception, but I'll get to that.

Revolinski is already known to many as the writer of travel guides and articles, and he brings the perspective of a global traveler and sojourner to the twelve tales in this collection of fiction. It would be easy for a writer with that background to put together a set of stories that are nothing more than the sort of surface fish out of water tales that are a staple of the travel story genre. You know the sort of thing: fresh faced American shows up in strange foreign town and learns life lessons. This collection is nothing of the sort.

Stealing Away combines stories that draw on Revolinski's background as a mid-Westerner with an early life spent in small towns, and his later life as a global traveler. The effect is to make this collection more than the sum of its parts and I'll try to explain why I think that is.

What these stories are about at their heart is relationships. The relationship between neighborhood friends, between a grandfather and grandson, between lovers, husbands and wives. The locations vary between small mid-Western towns, the road, and Turkey, Mexico, Central America, Syria, which might have led to some odd disconnects, but doesn't. It's part of what makes the collection work, I think, and the sense of strangeness and potential danger that you might expect in the foreign locales is present also in the solid small American towns where you might least expect it.

I think it's this quality that most engages the reader. As well as the charm of his descriptions of the small towns his characters inhabit, there is an underlying sense of menace in many of Revolinski's stories, a sense that things could go very wrong. In some cases it does. The story that came to mind as I was reading several of the tales in Stealing Away was Flannery O'Connor's 'A Good Man Is Hard To Find'. Revolinski's best work has some of that same sense of tension, of something beneath the surface that could emerge at any moment. His characters frequently find themselves out of their depth and sometimes they realize it in time to move on, sometimes they don't.

You can see this in the title story which features a young couple scamming their way across the midWest in a precarious existence that keeps them on the verge of making one bad final move. This road trip story follows its characters on a journey that you feel can only end in a cul de sac.

Sometimes the unease is in the protagonist's head, as in Mosaic, a tale of a fevered traveler in a foreign country, or Sorting Things Out, a story of a wife taking the measure of her own life as she reads about the murder of a young woman. In all cases, part of what makes Revolinski's writing work is the believable detail, and the descriptions that bring these different lives to life.

This is not to say that all of the stories have that sense of unease about them. Picking Blueberries, one of the best stories in the collection, deals with the sense of loss that comes with time and the recognition that the past is moving further away from us. In this tale the narrator visits his grandfather back in the old family home in a small town and observes that:

'Some families are like oak trees, spreading roots deep and dropping the seeds at arm's length. Ours, however, appeared more akin to the dandelions in the yard that Grandpa didn't give a shit about, taking to the wind and landing where they will, touching the earth lightly.'

This sense of impermanence amid the permanent is a recurring motif in Revolinski's tales. The sense that we are all just traveling through our worlds and that those things we take for granted are not necessarily always going to be there.

The one false note for me in the collection was the story On A Raft In Deep Water. This tale of a man revisiting a lakeside cabin and going for a swim in the lake has some of the same hints of unease present in other stories but feels less polished, and less rewarding even than Maple Seeds, the shortest story in the collection.

That one story aside, though, this is a fine collection and Revolinski writes with a keen eye and descriptive language that brings the scene to life without trying too hard. Here's an example from Maple Seeds:

'Moments later the shadow of a cloud dims the colors of it all and another mower starts up further down the street like a corner preacher who has continued to the next neighborhood to rattle on about the glory of the summer's coming. The cloud passes and the breeze rolls up its sleeves and blows again, sending maple seeds whirling into the sunlight, moving en masse down the street like an advancing cloud of locusts.'

Short story collections don't get the attention they deserve. When done well, as they are in Stealing Away, they bring an experience as satisfying as any novel. The themes that bind Revolinski's stories together, his skill in presenting the familiar and the strange in new ways, make this collection well worth the read.

[Daniel Higgins · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book of twelve short stories. Kevin brings you into little worlds with such ease, whether it’s a cabin in the woods, the cornfields of Illinois, or an ancient city in Turkey. Many of the characters in these stories have a sadness to them, or a sense of longing; even if they escape (steal away) it’s not certain that the next destination is going to be any better for them. While it's easy to empathize, or cringe, or worry about their fates, there’s plenty of subtle humor and realistic dialogue that rounds out the lives of these characters. The standout to me was "The Butcher Boys," a story that, when it ended, I had to stop and take a breath and go back. The small-town setting and childhood characters reminded me of Stephen King’s "The Body" (Stand By Me) in the best possible way. Great writing, great stories. I highly recommend this book!

[Martha Pings · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found myself dragging out the reading of the last story, not wanting this book to end. Each tale presents a distinct voice within a confident range. While each story resonated differently for me, each pulled me in with descriptions of the small things: a shrug, a colloquialism, unwavering eye contact, the leave-behinds of a traveler.
I’m a Midwesterner, and many of the characters share this with me. But there are others, too, with whom I find a kinship.
I’ll be re-reading some of these again and again.

[Preamtip Satasuk · Rating 5 out of 5]

First book I read in 2021. I picked it up and I couldn't put it down. A few stories in here brought me to tears and made me laugh. Many locations in the story reminded me of places in the Midwest where I live. Love it and highly recommended!

[Amy Byers · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book!!!! I love the little short stories that made it easier to read. I am a big fan of all his books!! This one kept me interested all the way through.

[James Clark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great collection of short stories!

[Dan Lunney · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Midwest is never far away in Revolinski's short stories. I resonated with most of these stories, having grown up in Wisconsin like the author. I have lived longer in Chicago than I did in Wisconsin but my upbringing informs who I am to this day. One of the themes in Revolinski's stories is the meaning of home or whether one can ever come back home. While this is a common theme in fiction, I found Revolinski's stories to be thought-provoking and able to crack the veneer of the innocence of the Midwest to show the darker side below. I have been aware of Revolinski through his other books (we were also at St. Norbert College at the same time and have many friends in common), I welcome his first foray into fiction.