The Faster Redder Road
The Faster Redder Road
The Best UnAmerican Stories of Stephen Graham Jones
This collection showcases the best writings of Stephen Graham Jones, whose career is developing rapidly from the noir underground to the mainstream. The Faster Redder Road features excerpts from Jones’s novels—including The Last Final Girl, The Fast Red Road: A Plainsong, Not for Nothing, and The Gospel of Z—and short stories, some never before published in book form. Examining Jones’s contributions to American literature as well as noir, Theodore C. Van Alst Jr.'s introduction puts Jones on the literary map.
[Jones’s] prose is sleek and image driven; his ludicrous situations are an entry point to social realism, exploring the very real lives of men and women on the margins of society. Most of his characters struggle to locate family and find love while facing violence and confronting personal demons of addiction and anger.
Stephen Graham Jones does for the literary world what Andy Warhol did for the visual arts: turns the common into the extraordinary, makes the low high, and absolves the sins of our literary pleasures. Like a madman in a factory, Jones produces one terrifying masterpiece after another—he is a superstar, and his brilliance will burn way longer than anyone’s fifteen minutes of fame.
Theodore C. Van Alst Jr. (enrolled member Mackinac Bands of Chippewa and Ottawa Indians) is an Active HWA member whose work has been published in Southwest Review, The Rumpus, Red Earth Review, the Journal of Working-Class Studies, Chicago Review, Apex Magazine, Electric Literature, Indian Country Today, and the Massachusetts Review, among others. He is also the author of Sacred Smokes and Sacred City (both from UNM Press).
Stephen Graham Jones is a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Colorado. He is the author of twenty-one books, including The Fast Red Road: A Plainsong, Ledfeather, The Gospel of Z, and Bleed into Me: A Book of Stories. The honors his work has received include the Texas Institute of Letters Jesse H. Jones Award for Fiction and the Independent Publisher Book Award for Multicultural Fiction. He is the recipient of the Writers’ League of Texas Fellowship in Literature and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literature.
