Tuesday is publication day!

Dear Friends and Readers,

My new collection of stories, The Gunman and the Carnival, is coming, any minute, from Baobab Press. Please join me in celebrating — attend the launch in Pittsburgh if you’re close by or the March livestream event if you can (details below) — and if you’ll be at #AWP24 please stop by Baobab’s booth and show them some love.

And most of all, wherever you are, please read the book!

Advance Praise

“In The Gunman and the Carnival, Catherine Gammon mirrors the brightly fractured nature of our lives at the sharp edge of this American moment. Her characters are recognizable in their striving for human connection in our time of despair and isolation—and in their struggle for footing upon a sinking landscape. Stylistically limber and by turns meditative, restless, and moving, these stories bravely attempt to channel what it means to be alive in this world now, and now, and now.” — Lauren Acampora, The Hundred Waters

“Here are a handful of dreams crumbled to ash. Actors on the cusp of stardom, who instead of making it, find themselves playing dead bodies and waiting tables. A recovering alcoholic savoring a sense of stability, who gifts herself a birthday walk on the beach only to find a body washed up at her feet. A man and woman who fall easily in love, and then, just as easily, into mutual resentment. What does a person do when their life fails to meet their expectations, when their hopes wilt before they fully bloom? Catherine Gammon’s The Gunman and The Carnival is a collection full of strikingly familiar disappointments and betrayals woven through with an appreciation for moments of beauty amongst the daily degradations of contemporary life. Told with precision and honesty, these stories are richly nuanced explorations of desire, regret, hurt, and hard-earned acceptance. “ — Jenny Irish, I Am Faithful and Lupine

“Gammon sharply observes her characters, loves them for their flaws and their hopes, and moves them through worlds defamiliarized by her punchy, powerful prose. Reading The Gunman and the Carnival made me revel in the joy and intensity of what a story can show us.” — Gwen Kirby, Shit Cassandra Saw

Events coming up in Pittsburgh (and online)

Bottom Feeder Books, 415 Gettysburg Street, February 17, launch event 6 – 8 pm, with Jane McCafferty and Nancy Krygowski

White Whale Bookstore, 4754 Liberty Avenue, March 18, 7 pm, with Lynn Emanuel and James Tadd Adcox  — online (live only) links at facebook, livestream

Riverstone Bookstore, 5841 Forbes Avenue, April 18, 7 pm, with Jane McCafferty

WANA Live, facebook and You Tube

Order The Gunman and the Carnival

Order The Martyrs, The Lovers or contact me for a surprise

The Gunman & The Carnival

Februay 6 is publication day for my new collection of stories from Baobab Press.

Some events coming up in Pittsburgh (and online)

Cozy Corner Bookstore, 5879 Ellsworth Avenue, January 19, celebrating the publication of James Tadd Adcox’s new Denmark: Variations

Bottom Feeder Books, 415 Gettysburg Street, February 17, launch event for The Gunman & The Carnival, with Jane McCafferty and Nancy Krygowski

White Whale Bookstore, 4754 Liberty Avenue, March 18, with Lynn Emanuel and James Tadd Adcox

Riverstone Bookstore, 5841 Forbes Avenue, April 18, with Jane McCafferty

WANA Live, online, January 18, and later on You Tube

So Many Good Things…

Updates on The Martyrs, The Lovers

Some wonderful reviews

from Necessary Fiction, review by Robert English:

“Written in hypnotic and densely layered prose, The Martyrs, The Lovers is an emotionally charged decon- struction of the layered character of Jutta Carroll. Just as Jutta is always using art, books, and historical figures to find comfort and reason, the novel attempts to strike the same resonant chords with readers. “Gandhi knew that the end was to be found in the means: there was no end, is no end, the means themselves are the end, the only end: the present, the ongoing present.” Like Gandhi, Gammon isn’t concerned with endings but with ideas, especially the ones that resonate now.”

from Ms. Magazine, review by Geri Lipschultz:

“Reading this book sent me to Petra Kelly’s story; I ransacked the Internet for information. But it is Gammon’s framing of the story that makes it even more haunting—the way she casts Jutta into the net of a very real history as well as the webs of the author’s own imagination. From this exhilarating exercise emerges a palimpsest, with Jutta’s story atop Petra Kelly’s, and a doubly powerful book. The Martyrs, the Lovers is deeply resonant for our day and age, as are the concerns of both the protagonist and the real politician and activist upon whom she is based.”

from West Trade Review, review by Tara Friedman:

“Gammon’s thorough and nonjudgmental thematic examination of false martyrdom and silence concealing masked generational and personal trauma will haunt readers long after the novel is complete. … [W[hile these jumps through time and space blend fact and fiction, they also act as testaments to Gammon’s literary and stylistic precision. However, it is the smaller moments, tucked deep within, where true beauty and vulnerability radiate – we connect with Jutta and each other through continued plights for causes, but we cannot tout justice for all without simultaneously taking care of our own biases, vulnerabilities, and mental, physical, and emotional wellness.”

A reading coming up in Pittsburgh

Some background on the birth of the book

from a Necessary Fiction Research Note by Catherine Gammon:

“Remember—truth always sounds incredible: truth is the true fiction”—these words from Heinrich Böll are the epigraph to the Notes at the end of The Martyrs, The Lovers.

As the novel’s narrator says, The Martyrs, The Lovers is a work of fiction, invention orbiting fact. Although I drew Jutta and Lukas loosely from the lives and reported histories of Petra Kelly and Gert Bastian, nothing in their fictional world should be taken as revealing or reflecting, directly or indirectly, the living or the dead.

Catherine Gammon in 1990, when this project began

Publication Day!

Leading up to this day many wonderful people have given the book some loving attention.

First, came WANA Live!, hosting me for a short reading and a chat with Christina Fisanick and Damian Dressick — watchable on Facebook and on YouTube

Next, Famous Writing Routines featured this extended interview

Pittsburgh’s wonderful Littsburgh offers a chance to “start reading…” an excerpt from the book.

Finally, a splendid first review this afternoon at West Trade Review.

Ordering here: Bookshop

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And PS, while you’re here — take a look at @nonabiding, a new Substack where I talk with and about other writers and other books!

The Martyrs, The Lovers

In case you missed it live … the first reading from The Martyrs, The Lovers

Pre-order for March 1 release date

Words of Praise from Gabriel Blackwell

“Catherine Gammon’s The Martyrs, The Lovers offers readers Gammon’s characteristically precise, beautiful prose, but there is also a thrilling new uncanniness here. With The Martyrs, The Lovers, Gammon renders humane truth out of fiction based in fact. A Sebaldian pleasure, perhaps related to Maylis de Kerangal’s practice of ‘weav[ing] the documentary as a poem’ in its comfort with unknowableness, and without doubt a thoroughly captivating story of the cruelties of ambition disappointed.” — Gabriel Blackwell, author of Doom Town and CORRECTION

Gabe Blackwell and I have never met but I’ve loved the books of his that I’ve read — most recently Doom Town from Zerogram Press — and as editor of the sadly closed The Rupture he published several short pieces of mine. When China Blue came out I asked if he would read an advance copy in the hope for words of recommendation, which he generously gave. Now he offers words of praise again, this time for The Martyrs, The Lovers. And they couldn’t be more beautiful.

With great thanks to Gabe I post them here, along with the link for pre-ordering.

Available for pre-order

Coming in March — preordering now

Loosely based on the life and death of German Green Party leader Petra Kelly, The Martyrs, The Lovers circles the mysteries surrounding the death of Jutta Carroll with her lover Lukas Grimm. Probing Jutta’s origin story, the rise to personal political stardom, and the fall into anxiety and public decline, the novel explores the forces and motivations that drive political passion and activism, and the counterforces, material and psychological, that constantly threaten progress.

Coming in winter …

A few more new things …

Two new and newer short publications —

“In the future perhaps he will have another chance” at Vol. 1 Brooklyn, August 1, 2021

“Agency” at Orca : A Literary Journal, November 2021

May we all enjoy!

And while we’re reading, not to be missed (although we’re past the halfway point, the pace remains meditative and unhurried)—take a look at #TolstoyTogether, reading War and Peace with A Public Space, discussions following on Twitter at the hashtag …

A wonderful review

Today at The Rumpus, this brilliant review of China Blue — “Child As Mother To The Woman” by Geri Lipschultz