Glossary for the End of Days: Stories

by Ian Stansel

Following his acclaimed debut novel, The Last Cowboys of San Geronimo, the eleven stories of Ian Stansel’s Glossary for the End of Days explore today’s cultural and political climate with a disarming blend of speculation and realism. Whether faced with tragedy, approaching disaster, or an all-too-familiar uncertainty, Stansel’s protagonists—siblings, lovers, executives, drifters—reveal complex and often startling turns of mind, surprising themselves as well as the reader.In Boulder, a man calls into a radio program with an altered tale of his brother’s murder—and faces the consequences when the story goes viral. In Tampa, a woman attends a convention of people believing themselves to be targets of clandestine government agencies. In Houston, a family with many secrets attempts to escape an oncoming tropical storm. In an East Coast college town, a professor has a charged run-in with a young woman from the radical right. And in Iowa, a cult suicide spurs the lone survivor to create a “glossary” in an effort to come to terms with his experience.​Simultaneously gritty and lyrical, grounded and visionary, Glossary for the End of Days gives us characters grappling with how to push on through dark days and dark times. This arresting, relevant collection tunes into and seeks to illuminate shared anxieties about the present—and future—of our world.

206 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 15, 2020

About the author

Ian Stansel is the author of the novel The Last Cowboys of San Geronimo and the short story collection Everybody's Irish, a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction.

Ian holds an MFA in fiction writing from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston, where from 2010 to 2012 he served as the editor of Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts.

His fiction has appeared in numerous literary journals, including Ploughshares, Ecotone, Cincinnati Review, Memorious, Antioch Review, and others. His stories have been selected for inclusion in the 2012 and 2013 editions of the New Stories of the Midwest anthology series and shortlisted for Best American Short Stories.

His nonfiction writing has appeared on Salon and The Good Men Project, and he contributes monthly posts on a variety of literary subjects to the blog at Ploughshares.

Born in Chicago, and raised there and in northern California, he currently lives in Louisville with his wife, writer Sarah Anne Strickley, and their two daughters. He teaches creative writing at the University of Louisville.

He can be contacted at istansel [at] gmail [dot] com.

Reviews

[Nadeem Zaman · Rating 5 out of 5]

A timely, expertly crafted, gem of a collection that demonstrates fiction's ability to expose truths while telling the most quotidian stories of being human and existing in the world.