Literature, Fiction
ISBN: 9780996717588​  (Print)
9780996717595 (eBook)
$14.99 (Print); $9.99 (eBook)
Paperback, eBook

About the Author

ED MEEK is a freelance writer and the author of three books of poetry: Flying, What We Love, and Spy Pond. His work has appeared in magazines, journals and newspapers including The Paris Review, The Sun, The North American Review, and The Boston Globe. He is living the dream with his wife in Somerville and Wellfleet.

Luck: Stories

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Ed Meek

A young bartender in the North End finds himself complicit in the breakdown of his housemate’s relationship with his girlfriend; a married, middle-aged professor of composition abjectly crumbles under the stress of his affair with a beautiful student.  In his debut fiction collection, poet Ed Meek vividly reimagines a gritty, freewheeling 1970s Boston whose cynical, impulsive  inhabitants—torn between the longing for human connection and the fear of domesticity—negotiate the blurry boundaries of personal responsibility. With these deceptively mundane accounts of ordinary lives in transition, Meek paints a humane, subtle portrait of ordinary people grasping at explanations for the things they do. ​
Advance Acclaim for Luck: Stories

“Ed Meek’s stories don't fool around. In quick jolts, with admirable restraint, he gives us characters who always seem to be on the edge of circumstances just beyond their comprehending and certainly beyond their control.  In other words, he gives us real people with whom we can identify, and he resists settling things for them. We leave his stories shaking our heads and saying to ourselves, ‘Yeah, I know about that, but I couldn't have said it as well.’ ”
- Bill Littlefield, novelist and host of NPR’s Only A Game

“Ed Meek is a writer to be reckoned with. His debut collection of seventeen short stories, Luck, shows a mastery of first-person voices, from college-professor to working-class woman.  One of his protagonists says that he “like[s] to magnify the conflict and watch the drama because otherwise it’s a goddamn bore.  Life, I mean.” The reader will find plenty of conflict—external and internal—in these intense perceptive fictions, whether they’re set in New England, Montana, or Iran.  This is a deeply satisfying  volume, a must read.”
- Miriam Kotzin, Editor and Publisher, PerContra and Contributing Editor, Boulevard

“No matter how far below zero it is outside, Meek can make readers sweat behind a hot grill in Montana. Every one of this collection’s sentences is worth sniffing, breathing and tasting like a wine with mouth feel and a fine, narrative aftertaste. Meek paces his reader honestly and creatively. His characters don’t kid themselves much and every story is a crisp conflict of mind, body and imagination. There are no tricks to Meek’s fiction. Each story’s language simply asks us to dwell in Meek’s swiftly turning worlds that are sketched with careful details and questions that always matter, even if we only think to ask them later for a moment or a lifetime.”
- Will Hochman, poet and author of Critical Companion to J.D. Salinger