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Driving in Cars with Homeless Men  - Kate Wisel - 10/19/2019 - 12:00pm

Driving in Cars with Homeless Men

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The Bubbler

Driving in Cars with Homeless Men is a love letter to women moving through violence. These linked stories are set in the streets and the bars, the old homes, the tiny apartments, and the landscape of a working-class Boston. Serena, Frankie, Raffa, and Nat collide and break apart like pool balls to come back together in an imagined post-divorce future. Through the gritty, unraveling truths of their lives, they find themselves in the bed of an overdosed lover, through the panting tongue of a rescue dog who is equally as dislanguaged as his owner, in the studio apartment of a compulsive liar, sitting backward but going forward in the galley of an airplane, in relationships that are at once playgrounds and cages. Driving in Cars with Homeless Men is the collective story of women whose lives careen back into the past, to the places where pain lurks and haunts. With riotous energy and rage, they run towards the future in the hopes of untangling themselves from failure to succeed and fail again.

 

Kate Wisel

Kate Wisel

Kate Wisel is originally from Boston. Her fiction has appeared in publications that include Gulf Coast, Tin House online, Redivider as winner of the Beacon Street Prize, Best Small Fictions anthology 2019, and elsewhere. Her debut linked short story collection, Driving in Cars With Homeless Men, is forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press as winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Award. She served as the 2018-2019 Carol Houck fiction fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and now lives in Chicago where she has been a long-time research assistant to music journalist Jim DeRogatis.