Hiding Out By Jonathan Messinger
[A] striking debut...Messinger's prose is the literary equivalent of the line drawings - - deceptively simple and direct - - and reading his succinct stories is as natural as breathing. But like the quick, fool-the-eye, knock-you-flat moves of kung fu (a recurrent theme), these tales of lonely, brooding, sweetly romantic guys pack covert and concentrated power.—Chicago Tribune
…captures the universal nervousness of adolescence and adulthood. Occasionally profound and often familiar, "Hiding Out" is tiny enough to slip in your jacket pocket for a rambling autumn walk. Lucky, since its stories feel made for this season.—Boston Globe
Messinger is a writer of nuance in this fearless collection of short stories. While the writing is mostly straightforward, these 15 subtle (even quiet) stories offer a sliding scale of solipsism. The characters—mostly aging Generation Xers with the occasional teen thrown in, and urban professionals (think Thirtysomething but with more thoughtful characters and less pretty people)—always seem a step away from saying something significant to each other.... Messinger’s stories are aching, not bleak, and the collection, wittily and expressively illustrated with Rob Funderburk’s line drawings, is fun, engaging, and a bit more than thought-provoking. A fresh, spot-on debut.—Booklist
Hiding Out "expertly captures a mixture of teenage summer malaise and a hint of innocence lost."—Publishers Weekly
Hiding Out author emerging There are other strange things going on in this book, due out next month. Strange and wonderful. Many stories are inventive and fun...there are undertones of the influential George Saunders. Like Saunders, Messinger deftly walks the thin line between sentimentality and absurdity. But there also are deeper, richer stories.—Omaha World Herald
Noteworthy New Release
Jonathan Messinger, cohost of the local literature-meets-comedy hour Dollar Store, finds inspiration for his show from dollar store bookshelves. He brins thsi spirit of randomness to his debut collection of short stories, which is full of lonely, but endearing characters, including himself.—
Chicago Magazine
Critic's Choice Messinger…is most evocative when recounting the dehumanizing effects of the contemporary workplace, noting of Waysun, who wears a smock at the factory, "he is uniform." The stories themselves are equally oblique, and a matter-of-fact tale set in a Chicago office can seem as otherworldly as a fable like "Not Even the Zookeeper Can Keep Control," in which a man-eating wolf seems to be devouring a town's entire population.—Chicago Reader
Getting into Hiding Out [A] powerful voice controls the stories, holding the reader’s interest from beginning to end...He strings words and events together in a way that offers surprises to the reader in every other line. The collection has everything flawed, fragile and fresh that you’d expect from a first book.—Birmingham Weekly
"When the Messinger is hot" Interview at Chicagoist. "With his first collection of short stories due out in October and a partnership with WBEZ's Third Coast International Audio Festival taking off, founder and host of the much-celebrated Dollar Store series Jonathan Messinger is really cleaning up."
Writer's Corner interview at What to Wear During an Orange Alert: "There is a running sense of humor throughout his work, even in the face of the most sobering issues."
Also check out:
Boston Globe
Bostonist
Boston Now
Chicago Sun-Times
New York Times
Chapel Hill Independent Weekly
Beverly Citizen
I'm not going to fuck around here—Hiding Out is a book you should read. Messinger switches up styles, voices, even locales with aplomb. Just when I thought I knew where things were headed, along came the next story—or in some cases, the next paragraph—to confound expectations in the very best ways. Girls, ghosts, loneliness, the power of memory and coming of age, it's all here, the real stuff of life.
—Bryan Charles
author of Grab On to Me Tightly as if I Knew the Way
Look here. Jonathan Messinger is that guy. That guy whose stories made me come out of blurb retirement to write one more. The stories in this book are beautiful and simple and funny and true. You should not want more from a story than you will find in here. —Elizabeth Crane, author of You Must Be This Happy to Enter and When the Messenger is Hot
There’s such freshness, naturalness, humor and charm to Jonathan
Messinger’s stories—an overall sense of immediacy that planted me in
the present—that only in retrospect did I realize how in Hiding Out, Messinger
had also subtly constructed a personal and original world. —Stuart Dybek,
author of The Coast of Chicago and I Sailed With Magellan
One part Office Space, one part George Saunders, one part Steve Martin’s
Lonely Guy, and one part Richard Yates’ Eleven Kinds of Loneliness: shake
it up, and what you have is a wholly original concoction. Hilarious at
times, heartbreaking at others, Jonathan Messinger’s Hiding Out is always,
always surprising. These are fantastic stories by a writer whose next book
I’m already eager to read. —John McNally, author of The Book of Ralph and
America’s Report Card
Hiding Out touches softly (and often painfully) on the intimacies and
embarrassments of usually ordinary lives, revealing the way these lives
open briefly into extraordinary gestures. Add to that slight cracks in
the surface of reality and you have a phalanx of stories that weave their
way through reality by simultaneously staring in at the hidden tender
heart of things and gazing out at the fantastic always lurking beyond the
real. An impressive debut. —Brian Evenson, author of The Open Curtain and
The Wavering Knife
This is a vastly creative and compassionate book; filled with stories that
explore the ways our dreams, our secret fantasies and fears, often intrude
on our real lives to hilarious and heart-breaking effect. In story after
story, Messinger peeks behind the curtain of the everyday to reveal the
wondrous and terrifying possibilities of the human imagination. He is
that rarest of finds: a writer whose feats of invention simultaneously dazzle
and inspire. Go on. Turn the page and take a peek. You won’t be sorry.
—Scott Snyder, author of Voodoo Heart
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Hiding Out
By Jonathan Messinger
Illustrated by Rob Funderburk
Messinger’s stories are aching, not bleak, and the collection, wittily and expressively illustrated with Rob Funderburk’s line drawings, is fun, engaging, and a bit more than thought-provoking. A fresh, spot-on debut.—Mark Eleveld, Booklist
Nothing is as it seems: A jilted lover dons robot armor to win back the heart of an ex-girlfriend; an angel loots the home of a single father; a teenager finds the key to everlasting life in a video game. In this much-anticipated debut, one of Chicago's most exciting young writers has crafted playful and empathic tales of misguided lonely hearts. Sparkling with humor and showcasing an array of styles, Hiding Out features characters dodging consequences while trying desperately to connect.
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