Joy, PA

Joy, PA - Cover

A Novel

by Steven Sherrill

Yellow Shoe Fiction

272 pages / 5.50 x 8.50 inches / no illustrations

ebook available

Fiction

Paperback / 9780807159569 / February 2015
A darkly insightful evocation of the post-industrial era, Joy, PA tells the story of a family teetering on the precipice of ruin. The Augenbaughs live in a broken and decaying town where the last vestiges of country-club wealth run up against the terrible realities of working-class poverty. Abigail, a fervent believer in the apocalyptic teachings of a radio preacher, is desperate to save her son from Judgment Day as she readies herself for the Rapture—due to arrive in just a few days. Her husband, Burns, has moved to the basement to live out his days in a medicated stupor, unable to cope with memories of his service in Iraq. Caught between the suffering of his mother and father, ten-year-old Willie fights the inherited demons that have savaged his parents’ tenuous grasp on reality.
 
The somber drama surrounding the Augenbaughs plays out with a piercing and commanding lyrical beauty. Both transfixing and disconcerting, Steven Sherrill’s empathetic portrait of alienation elicits hope and sympathy amidst shattered but no-less-dignified lives.

STEVEN SHERRILL, associate professor of English and integrative arts at Penn State, Altoona, is the author of The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break, published in 2000 and translated into eight languages; Visits from the Drowned Girl; and The Locktender’s House. His collection of poems, Ersatz Anatomy, was published in 2010.

Praise for Joy, PA

“There’s compassion in [this book’s] hammering heart and poetry in its bleak, relentless prose.”—The Guardian (UK)

“Steven Sherrill writes like Cormac McCarthy on speed: beautiful short sentences create a breathless suspense, in which I as a reader, although a skeptic, experience the impending Apocalypse. The anticipation of the end drives several protagonists into a frenzy and acts of violence, rendered poetically into a wonderful and terrifying painting, Goya in the blood-rusted Bible Belt.”—Josip Novakovich, author of Infidelities and April Fool’s Day

“In phantasmagoric, almost delirious prose, Steven Sherrill writes from a distinctly southern perspective, from a landscape that is rendered credulous and incredulous at once, as parody and earnest rendering, a psychic road map of contemporary dystopic America. Happily, there’s still a place for skewed prophetic voices the likes of Sherrill in American letters. A singular voice; there’s no one else like him on the literary landscape.”—Robin Hemley, author of Reply All

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