KYLE MINOR discusses PRAYING DRUNK, in conversation with AMELIA GRAY

Praying Drunk (Sarabande Books)

Skylight Books is thrilled to welcome back Kyle Minor. For today's reading he'll be joined by another Skylight favorite,Amelia Gray.

The characters in Praying Drunk speak in tongues, torture their classmates, fall in love, hunt for immortality, abandon their children, keep machetes beneath passenger seats, and collect porcelain figurines. A man crushes pills on the bathroom counter while his son watches from the hallway; missionaries clumsily navigate an uprising with barbed wire and broken glass; a boy disparages memorized scripture, facedown on the asphalt, as he fails to fend off his bully. From Kentucky to Florida to Haiti, these seemingly disparate lives are woven together within a series of nested repetitions, enacting the struggle to remain physically and spiritually alive throughout the untamable turbulence of their worlds. In a masterful blend of fiction, autobiography, and surrealism, Kyle Minor shows us that the space between fearlessness and terror is often very small. Long before Praying Drunk reaches its plaintive, pitch-perfect end.

Kyle Minor is a columnist at Salon and The Nation. His work has appeared in Best American Mystery Stories, Best American Nonrequired Reading, Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers, Forty Stories: New Voices from Harper Perennial, Esquire, Volt and many others. He is the winner of the 2012 Iowa Review Prize for Short Fiction, the Tara M. Kroger Prize for Short Fiction, and is the author of In The Devil's Territory (Dzanc, 2008).

Amelia Gray grew up in Tucson, Arizona. Her first collection of stories, AM/PM, was published in 2009. Her second collection, Museum of the Weird, was awarded the Ronald Sukenick/American Book Review Innovative Fiction Prize. She is the author of the novel Threats. She lives in Los Angeles.