Like Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad and Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Kevin Clouther's Maximum Speed moves across time and point of view to dramatize youth's aftershocks. The unifying presence in three characters' lives is Billy, an apprentice drug dealer in South Florida. His improbable appearance twenty years after his death reconnects Nick, Andrea, and Jim with each other and with the shared secret of their past.
"These wonderfully evocative, interconnected stories are about growing up, growing apart, and how modern communications technology enables distant figures from the past to suddenly be brought into the present."
-Booklist
"With wounded, spiked prose in the Chekhovian observational style, brightened with a humane levity of heart, Maximum Speed spins us around the maypole of the gouged lives of four friends. This book has authorial soul, and soul lasts, as will these diamond-scratched pages."
-Tom Paine, author of Scar Vegas
"With meticulous craft and profound compassion, Kevin Clouther conjures this vibrant collection of connected stories of friends wrestling the ghosts of their past. Balancing heart and humor, Maximum Speed bears witness to the raw hope of youth and the bittersweet wisdom of age."
-Frances de Pontes Peebles, author of The Air You Breathe
"Moving effortlessly between humor and heartbreak, these stories add up, as in the best linked collections, to a rich and varied world of tenderness and beauty."
-Nathan Oates, author of A Flaw in the Design
"With artistry and heart, Kevin Clouther has written a superbly crafted collection of linked stories."
-Patricia Ann McNair, author of Responsible Adults
Kevin Clouther is the author of We Were Flying to Chicago: Stories (2014). He is an Associate Professor at the University of Nebraska Omaha Writer's Workshop, where he directs the MFA in Writing. He lives with his wife and two children in Omaha.
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