All the Comfort Sin Can Provide
With raw, lyrical ferocity, All the Comfort Sin Can Provide delves into the beguiling salve that sin can promise—tracing those hidden places most of us are afraid to acknowledge. In this collection of brutally unsentimental short stories, Grant Faulkner chronicles dreamers, addicts, and lost souls who have trusted too much in wayward love, the perilous balm of substances, or the unchecked hungers of others, but who are determined to find salvation in their odd definitions of transcendence.
Taking us from hot Arizona highways to cold Iowa hotel rooms, from the freedoms of the backwoods of New Mexico to the damnations of slick New York City law firms, Faulkner creates a shard-sharp mosaic of desire that careens off the page—honest, cutting, and wise.
Buy All the Comfort Sin Can Provide
Praise
“Somewhere between sinister and gleeful the characters in Grant Faulkner’s story collection All the Comfort Sin Can Provide blow open pleasure—guilty pleasure, unapologetic pleasure, accidental pleasure, repressed pleasure. Really, at the heart of all identity is the reach for pleasure, and then what actually comes, all those moments of slippage where we do the wrong thing, take a ridiculous risk, double down on failure, land in a forsaken place, slip the mainstream of things enough to change and become. These characters exude beauty from their flaws. These stories are lit.”
–Lidia Yuknavitch, bestselling author of the novel The Book of Joan
“Full of bad behavior and a ferocious desire for escape, All the Comfort Sin Can Provide is a catalog of longing. Faulkner’s arresting characters broadcast their worst decisions from grimy motel rooms, greasy kitchens, and sprawling American highways, each of them hellbent on the promise of something better.”
–Kimberly King Parsons, author of Black Light, nominated for the 2019 National Book Award
“All the Comfort Sin Can Provide delivers on the promise of Grant Faulkner’s daring debut with a follow-up collection of stories that excavates possibility, salvation, and the deceptive comforts one finds in so many pleasures.”
–Adam Johnson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his 2012 novel, The Orphan Master’s Son, and the National Book Award for his 2015 story collection Fortune Smiles
Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Actions to Boost Your Creative Mojo
Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Actions to Boost Your Creative Mojo
Every writer knows that as rewarding as the creative process is, it can often be a bumpy road. Have hope and keep at it! Designed to kick-start creativity, this handsome handbook gathers a wide range of insights and advice for writers at any stage of their career. From tips about how to finally start that story to helpful ideas about what to do when the words just aren’t quite coming out right, Pep Talks for Writers provides motivation, encouragement, and helpful exercises for writers of all stripes.
Fissures: One Hundred 100-Word Stories
Early praise for Fissures:
“Fissures is disjunction at its most disruptive—Faulkner’s stories are ‘spectral spaces’ captured with ‘hard borders’ and his dangerous eye for truth.”
—Pamela Painter, author of Wouldn’t You Like to Know
“Grant Faulkner’s stories are poetic and creepy and funny and touching and you’re going to have a swell time. I wish I had written some of them.”
—Lou Beach, author of 420 Characters
“Grant Faulkner is the impresario of 100-word stories. The 100 tantalizing fictions in shock and please—a precious pile of sparkling surprises.”
—Jane Ciabattari, author of Stealing the Fire and California Stories
“Grant Faulkner’s sharply observed, darkly funny, heart-breaking bursts of highly compressed prose offers a startling view of what reality might look like through a funhouse microscope. Fissures pushes the boundaries of flash prose, and thank goodness for that. Sometimes less is so much more.”
—Dinty W. Moore, author of Dear Mister Essay Writer Guy: Advice and Confessions on Writing, Love, and Cannibals
See the media kit for Fissures.
Read some of the 100-word stories in Fissures.
The Names of All Things
Jim has abandoned his responsible adult life in Omaha, and when his car breaks down in Tucson, he takes a job as a substitute teacher at Lester Preparatory Academy, a sketchy private school for rich, wayward youth. Crystal’s wealthy LA parents have dumped her in Lester after she’s had one too many dangerous dalliances.
Neither Jim or Crystal know where they belong except in flight. Together they travel through the Southwest in all of its vast sweeping beauty and desultory rhythms, inhabiting the burns of its textures, hoping to find something like a home.
Buy The Names of All Things as an ebook.
Best Small Fictions 2016
This second installment of The Best Small Fictions continues to celebrate the diversity and quality captured in fiction forms fewer than 1,000 words. I’m happy to have two of my stories included with forty-four other acclaimed and emerging writers—including Alberto Chimal, Toh EnJoe, Kathy Fish, Britt Haraway, Dan Moreau, Janey Skinner, R. O. Kwon, Robert Scotallero, and Eliel Lucero.