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Mark Winegardner, author of the novels The Veracruz Blues and Crooked River Burning, is the Janet Burroway Professor of English and the director of the creative writing program at Florida State University. He lives in
Tallahassee, Florida. You can find his official website at www.markwinegardner.com
Photograph © Miriam Berkley
That's True of Everybody: Stories
The proprietor of a bowling alley whose artist daughter paints only phalluses. A ninth-grade girl who marries in haste only to be faced with impotence. A libidinous poet who learns the meaning of harassment. A gifted basketball player whose fraternal twin sister is awarded $200,002 for being pregnant. The life and loves of a professional lawn mower. The life and death of a drive-in movie theater. All of these elements make up the multicolored canvas of Mark Winegardner's debut short-story collection. Winegardner, whose rich and epic novel, Crooked River Burning, gave the much maligned city of Cleveland, Ohio, a fresh and vibrant aspect, returns to the Midwest that he knows so intimately and casts a piercingly compassionate eye on its denizens who lead lives of not necessarily quiet desperation. The result is a kaleidoscopic picture of a people who are arrogant and humble, faithful and disloyal, driven and floundering-a people who are, finally, America itself.
Mark Winegardner's Summer Reading List
Charming Billy
by Alice McDermott
McDermott has a genius for writing 600-page novels in 200-some pages, but this is her masterpiece. So far.
Revolutionary Road
by Richard Yates
Sleeper pick for the Great American Novel.
Nobody's Fool
by Richard Russo
Everyone's reading Russo's Empire Falls this summer, but his whole body of work is deeply worthwhile. Sully lives.
Motherless Brooklyn
by Jonathan Lethem
A brilliant, hillarious sui generis wolf in the sheep's clothing of a crime novel.
What I Lived For
by Joyce Carol Oates
Her greatest novel, a magnificent beach read, and also hefty enough that you can use it as a weapon to bludgeon anyone who uses Oates's astonishing productivity as an excuse not to read her.
Back to Authors'
Summer Reading Lists
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