Six Off 66 by David Daniel
$10.00
Out of stock
104 pp
Released in August 2007
Six Off 66 is one part old-timey radio announcer, one part Reader’s Digest condensed book, one part Jack Kerouac. Here you’ll find no kind of pyrotechnics. You will find plenty of the varieties of mystery that snake into your sleep on a snowy winter in Vermont or New Hampshire or Massachusetts. The news of the world—the trucker that comes upon that thing in the road near Ayres City, say, or the way the Japanese take their baths on Pearl Harbor Day—dwells among the fragments of experience that mean sideways things you know but can’t articulate: that black-and white land camera you hold in your hand in the hour before you board the Lone Star Limited southbound for Texarkana, that Chinese dogwood Paula saw and said was beautiful, that day Kenny said you smelled like a French whore. David Daniel’s milieu is pure Americana, but his sensibility is something stranger and vaguely European. If the setting were changed to Budapest or Paris or Prague, we’d know what to do with these stories. Instead, we’re left to reckon with the categoriless thing that sits at the intersection of oblivion and I-495. Let the reader beware.
—Kyle Minor, author of In the Devil’s Territory
These stories are beautifully written, as hard and glittering as diamonds. But it’s in their strangeness that we recognize the vagaries of human nature—that we recognize ourselves.
—Jay Atkinson, author of City in Amber and Tauvernier Street
Additional information
| Author Bio | In addition to nine novels, including Ark (1985), Murder at the Baseball Hall of Fame (‘96) and The Tuesday Man (‘91), Daniel has published more than 80 short stories (some of which are collected in Six Off 66). He has worked as a janitor, a carpenter, a tennis instructor, truck driver, and a “brain slicer” at Harvard Medical School. He teaches at Lowell Middlesex Academy Charter School and is an adjunct professor at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, where he has served as the Jack Kerouac Visiting Writer in Residence. |
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