Joseph Boone’s Short Story Publications

SHORT STORY PUBLICATIONS

Joseph Allen Boone.

1. "Chrysalis," Tikkun (June 2019).

2. "The Sound of Water," Bridport Prize Anthology (2019). Pushcart Nomination.

3. "He," Birmingham Arts Journal (October 2018).

4. "Our Lady of Rosas," Razor Literary Magazine (Spring 2018).

Joseph Allen Boone has taken the seeds of a simple observation and musings, and turned them into an insightful story of change occurring below mainstream culture. Times are changing, but roses will always have thorns.

5. "Me, Too?" The Write Launch (April 2019). Pushcart Prize Nomination.

Three parts, four characters, narrated in diminishing time intervals—“Me Too?” is Joseph Allen Boone’s trenchant masterpiece of life’s precarious edges.

6. "Bubba’s Shoes,” American Writers’ Review (2019).

7. “Furnace Creek," Green Hills Literary Lantern (June 2018).

8. “Suffer the Little Children to Come Unto Me.” Poydras (December 2018).

—Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize for The Hours

“A funny, moving, and true rendition of everybody’s story: surviving our childhoods, which can be uniquely challenging if you’re Southern, and queer. Boone is a natural novelist, and Furnace Creek is a genuine accomplishment.”

—Michael Cunningham The Hours

Colm Tóibín, Author of The Master and The Magician

[This] ingenious re-telling and re-imagining of Dickens’’ Great Expectations . . . plays innocence against experience, youth against age, privilege against poverty, in an America of the 1960s. Its narrator is endearing and knowing and also, like the novelist, a born noticer.

- Colm Tóibín, Author of The Master and The Magician

—Publishers Weekly

“With lyric beauty, welcome frankness, and rare emotional urgency, Boone reimagines Dickens’ Great Expectations in the American South . . . with a queer perspective and countless new and illuminating approaches. Exquisite prose and a storyteller’s elan.”

—Publishers Weekly

—Kirkus Reviews

“Boone’s prose is lyrical and inventive, merging Dickensian wit and texture with a dash of Southern gothic. The characters are delicately drawn and elegantly complicated.”

—Kirkus Reviews

—Marianne Wiggins, Pulitizer and National Book Award nominee for Evidence of Things Unseen

“A page-turning novel, a spirited American retelling of an English classic . . . . Boone brings both worlds vividly alive with his ebullient prose. A joyously ambitious debut!”

—Marianne Wiggins, Pulitzer and National Book Award nominee for Evidence of Things Unseen

—Dana Johnson, Flannery O’Connor Award for Break Any Woman Down

“Furnace Creek has everything brilliant novels have . . . It is also wickedly funny, that rare novel full of charming humor and sharp cultural commentary at every turn.”

—Dana Johnson, Flannery O’Connor Award for Break Any Woman Down

—Viet Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer

“A sweeping, Gothic tale of sex, race, and a young man’s education. I was totally entertained and, most of all, seduced.”

—Viet Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer

—Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, author of Becoming Dickens and The Turning Point: The Year that Changed Charles Dickens and the World

“A playful reimagining of Dickens, a tautly plotted thriller, a beautifully observed coming of age story: Furnace Creek . . . seizes you from the beginning and refuses to let you go.”

—Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, author of Becoming Dickens and The Turning Point: The Year that Changed Charles Dickens and the World

—Lewis di Simone, Gay and Lesbian Review International

“The love of literature hinges not just on beautiful writing but on an awareness that the stories of the past have a lot to teach us in the present. By transposing Dickens into our own era, Boone demonstrates just that—and also shows that those stories belong to all of us, regardless of our gender, sexuality, or time in history.”

—Lewis di Simone, Gay and Lesbian Review International

—Barry Qualls, Southern Review of Literature

“The richness of [its] characters makes Furnace Creek work brilliantly. But more: Boone gives them stories that compel the reader to see them as individuals in a specific time and place. Boone’s writing . . . is at times lyrical, memorable, and always in service to the story.”

—Barry Qualls, Southern Review of Literature

—Molly Engelhardt, Books Cover to Cover

No one can outdo Dickens when it comes to creating characters that hold; but what Dickens couldn’t do that Boone can is give [Great Expectations] a modern twist by exploring the inner life of his teenage protagonist, which is as turbulent as the times . . . A wonderful novel with psychological depth to match a period in American history that was both stormy and exhilarating. Boone is a masterful writer.”

—Molly Engelhardt, Books Cover to Cover

—Greg Bills, author of Fearful Symmetry and Consider This Home

“No single review could possibly encompass the abundance of lives and life underway in [this] novel—nor should anyone wish it to. That’s why we read books like this one: to get happily lost in their capacious, prodigious pages. A satisfyingly substantial libation built upon a potent spirit.”

—Greg Bills, author of Fearful Symmetry and Consider This Home