Banjo Grease

The author of Brother Carnival and The World’s Smallest Bible examines small-town life in this collection of sixteen stories.

There is an inexplicable gravity in a small town. It can be read and enjoyed like a favorite book for most of its inhabitants. Comforting are its streets and institutions, its wedding and obituary announcements. Banjo Grease is about life and death in a mill town where at each epiphany and rite of passage, the narrator yields a ration of innocence. Characters portray class as a marker as strong as race and gender, and distrust that they will ever escape in their lifetimes. Faulkner uses the term “eager fatalism.” These stories’ cumulative effect asks: When exchanging naiveté for worldliness, what is lost in denying one’s past?

“These stories float through the reader like frozen images. Each one fits into the others unevenly as jagged glass. This is the essence of great fiction at the end of the century; Ray Carver and Thom Jones plowed into some stupendous force that whips along with a tilted wild energy.” —Kate Gale, author of The Goldilocks Zone

“Dennis Must’s first collection of short stories is no ordinary debut but the mature work of a fully accomplished literary artist. Moreover, his originality, his deep irreverence, and his compassion for working-class men and women . . . Strivers and seekers of dreams, signal him as an inspired author in a new American grain―a visionary, poet, and realist.” —Tom Jenks, cofounder and editor, Narrative Magazine

“Dennis Must’s stunning collection Banjo Grease is just what one hopes for: a series of intriguing, interlocking stories whose cumulative force goes beyond the sum of its parts.”— Geoffrey Clark, author of Two, Two, Lily-White Boys