Everyone Here Has a Gun: Stories

By Lucas Southworth

In a tightrope act of darkness and humor, fantasy and reality, the twelve stories in this award-winning collection describe characters searching for comfort and stability in a world that is ultimately too vast, violent, and incomprehensible. As they revert to what seems most simple and familiar--public transportation, television, museums, fairy tales--they discover only murder, displacement, fragmentation, and obsession.

In "The Running Legs and Other Stories," Mary Beth attempts to recall a traumatic experience from her childhood, filtering it through children's stories told by her "wicked" stepmother. In "Lincoln's Face, A Resurrection," an African American make-up artist struggles with concepts of history as she transforms a former lover into Abraham Lincoln. The young narrator in "Under the World" grieves for his parents by losing himself in a worldwide subway system. And in the title story, the speaker describes a small room where everyone armed with a single gun waits with dread and anticipation for the inevitable first shot.

Anton Chekhov famously noted that if a story introduces a gun in the first act, that gun must go off by the third. Yet while weapons are often present in Southworth's stories, they are rarely fired, existing instead as a constant reminder of the power people can have over each other and the violent potential of narrative itself.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1625340532
• ISBN13: 9781625340535
• Release Date: November 2013
• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Length: 176 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.7" x 8.8"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher