Magician: Stories

Ordinary men and women and their everyday dilemmas are the deceptively simple material for this award-winning collection of stories from the author of the critically-acclaimed novel The Girls Next Door. Peter Turchi reveals a new virtuosity in eleven powerfully wrought stories that depict characters of all ages struggling to make the right choices, and often surprising themselves. In “Magician,” a beautiful young actress weighs the enticing, frightening possibilities for the future with a 52-year-old-man. In “Alligator” an adolescent girl begins to understand the attractions of sex, alcohol, and deception during a family vacation. And in the subtle, disturbing “Everything I Need” a young man uprooted from a small town in Arizona seeks companionship in Chicago by attaching himself to the anonymous community of a radio call-in show. Turchi’s spare yet haunting style is perfectly attuned to the rhythms and textures of quiet lives in crisis. Author Peter Turchi’s his stories have appeared in Story, Ploughshares, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Colorado Review, and Puerto del Sol, among other magazines. He co-edited, with Charles Baxter, Bringing The Devil to His The Craft of Fiction and the Writing Life. He directs and teaches in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers.