Populated by strangers, ghosts, and other shadowy figures, the thirteen stories in The Unsettling attend to those startling moments when what we have understood as familiar is suddenly revealed as mysterious and foreign.
A lonely man saving library books from an outbreak of mold listens to a coworker’s tale about a blind woman and imbues it with his own sense of romance; a woman drives a Gold Firebird through the desert with a television playing "Rockford Files" reruns on the passenger seat; and a girl returns to her childhood home to spy on its new inhabitants, not realizing they are aware of her surveillance; a Poe-obsessed medical examiner constructs ornate scenes in an attempt to provoke hope in the forgotten lives of a dark and desperate city.
Told through Rock’s imaginative and wholly original voice, these are haunted tales about fascination, transformation, and the relationship between the two.
Peter Rock was born and raised in Salt Lake City. His most recent novel is
The Shelter Cycle. He is also the author of the novels
My Abandonment,
This Is the Place,
Carnival Wolves,
The Bewildered, and
The Ambidextrist, and a story collection,
The Unsettling. Rock attended Deep Springs College, received a BA in English from Yale University, and held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. He has taught fiction at the University of Pennsylvania, Yale, Deep Springs College, and in the MFA program at San Francisco State University. His stories and freelance writing have both appeared and been anthologized widely, and his books published in various countries and languages. The recipient of a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, an Alex Award and others, he currently resides in Portland, Oregon, where he is a Professor in the English Department of Reed College.
Brian Evenson is the author of a dozen books of fiction, most recently the story collection
Windeye and the novel
Immobility, both of which were finalists for a Shirley Jackson Award. His novel
Last Days won the American Library Association's award for Best Horror Novel of 2009). His novel
The Open Curtain was a finalist for an Edgar Award and an International Horror Guild Award. Other books include
The Wavering Knife (which won the IHG Award for best story collection),
Dark Property, and
Altmann's Tongue. He has translated work by Christian Gailly, Jean Frémon, Claro, Jacques Jouet, Eric Chevillard, Antoine Volodine, Manuela Draeger, David B., and others. He is the recipient of three O. Henry Prizes as well as an NEA fellowship. His work has been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese and Slovenian. He lives and works in Valencia, California, where he teaches at CalArts.
