Literature, Fiction
ISBN: 9780997574203  (Print)
9780997574210 (eBook)
$14.99 (Print); $9.99 (eBook)
Paperback, eBook

About the Author

MICHAEL ONOFREY was born and raised in Los Angeles. Currently he lives in Japan. Over seventy of his short stories have been published in literary journals and magazines, in print and online, in such places as Cottonwood, The Evansville Review, Natural Bridge, Snowy Egret, Terrain.org, Weber--The Contemporary West, and The William and Mary Review. Among anthologized work, his stories have appeared in Creativity & Constraint (Wising Up Press, 2014), In New Light (Northern Initiative for Social Action, 2013), Road to Nowhere and Other New Stories from the Southwest (University of New Mexico Press, 2013), and Imagination & Place: An Anthology (Imagination & Place Press, 2009). He can be found online at Directory of Writers, Poets and Writers, and on Facebook. 

Bewilderment

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Michael Onofrey

After three decades of an over-extended youth abroad, fifty-six-year-old Wade Ricky returns home to the Los Angeles suburbs to care for his dying mother and come to terms with his memories of an awkwardly sensual affair with Herta, a German woman he meets while biking across India; a two-year stint in Peshawar as an assistant to a blind British expat; and a cheerfully surreal world of drugs and sexual voyeurism in which Wade is continually a complicit outsider. As months turn into years, Wade finds companionship with a landscape painter grieving for her son killed in Iraq and slowly rebuilds his life in America—even as he begins to understand, finally, why he must be alone. 

In pared-down, richly evocative prose that captures the hidden complexities of social and geopolitical relations, Michael Onofrey’s debut novel is a loving, even joyful meditation about the transience of human connection and the experience of solitude.   ​
Advance Acclaim for Bewilderment

"Michael Onofrey explores the geographies of both land and mind in his new novel Bewilderment. The protagonist is propelled by a visceral mixture of curiosity and confusion that, ultimately, forces him to confront his longing to connect. Bewilderment is an accomplished and witty novel that examines the line drawn between individual perception and the larger reality, then provides its reader permission to blur the line in order to take it all in.”   
- Jen Knox, author of After the Gazebo

“Michael Onofrey has crafted a daring and adventurous story about life's choices, those we make and those made for us. Whatever the case, we all at some point face a moment of bewilderment, a moment when time stops and the events of our life dissolve and slip away like paint on a canvas left in the rain. An engaging story . . . and a remarkable experience of bewilderment.” 
- Christine Cote, Still Point Art Gallery and Shanti Arts Publishing ​