By turns haunting, hilarious, and heartbreaking, Charles Haverty鈥檚 debut collection charts the journeys of men, women, and children cast out of familiar territory into emotional terra incognita where people and things are rarely what they seem. These twelve stories are populated with ex-nuns and Freedom Riders, Chaucer scholars and strippers, out-of-work comedy writers and presidents, navigating their way through bedrooms and emergency rooms, backyard burial parties and airplane crash sites, the Piazza San Marco and the post-apocalyptic suburbs of Boston.
A sixteen-year-old boy unearths grisly evidence of his genteel grandfather鈥檚 racist past. At his sister鈥檚 booze-soaked destination wedding, a recovering alcoholic English professor is finagled into ghostwriting their unreliable father鈥檚 nuptial toast. A small town lawyer鈥檚 Edenic existence is jeopardized when his wife鈥檚 younger brother is arrested for a rash of local burglaries. In the wake of her daughter鈥檚 brush with disaster in the Haiti earthquake, a mother finds herself drawn down a dark neighborhood sidewalk toward what might or might not be a dead body. And in the title story鈥攖he first of three linked stories鈥攁 pious altar boy confronts the twin mysteries of sex and death through the auspices of a classmate鈥檚 divorced mother.
There are secrets at the center of each of these daring and original stories鈥攕ecrets that separate these characters from one another but grow in the mind and the heart, connecting them with all of us.
"In just a few sentences, the author creates a whole world, at once familiar and alien and utterly absorbing."鈥Wall Street Journal
"In contrast to the clean elegance of the prose, these stories dig through the messiest of human interactions. Haverty plows deep into the emotional turmoil of his characters to excavate shared truths. Historical events and figures contextualize the narratives and give greater depth, and the further the stories delve into the motivations of the protagonists, the more relatable they become."鈥Publishers Weekly
鈥淭here would be enough pleasure in Excommunicados if Charles Haverty鈥檚 formally elegant stories were merely perfectly crafted and observed, plus funny, and also quietly sad, not to mention so various in subject matter. They are all that in addition to being page-turners, each one. They made me happy.鈥濃擩ane Hamilton, author, A Map of the World
鈥淐harles Haverty is a beautifully balanced writer with a fine ear for prose and an intuitive-feeling grasp of the dynamics of human conflict and reconciliation. He gets how the real human dramas unfold over time and often as not reveal themselves through hairline cracks becoming fissures. He is both accurate and wise.鈥濃擲ven Birkerts, author, The Gutenberg Elegies
鈥淐harles Haverty drives right into the heart of the storm鈥攕torms of doubt, storms of anger, storms of perverse desire, storms of regret. Here are stories that ask enormous questions about faith and doubt, love and death, justice and forgiveness, questions that are always anchored to real human characters in a gorgeously rendered physical reality. I loved the pointillist precision of Haverty鈥檚 descriptions: 鈥榮udsy鈥 flowers cover caskets, telephone receivers smell like 鈥榗igarettes and Juicy Fruit,鈥 pink salt flies through red taillights. You might hear echoes of Jesus鈥 Son and Flannery O鈥機onnor and Bruce Springsteen and the Book of Ecclesiastes, but these tales belong to Haverty. His scenes are charged with emotion and wonderfully, discomfitingly true to life, whether they unfold inside a Catholic church or a couple鈥檚 bedroom. Haverty blurs the sacred and the profane, with plenty of jokes in between. (A father admits to his son at a destination wedding: 鈥業 know I鈥檓 the last resort at this resort.鈥) Haverty does a beautiful job of revealing how the present moment is always haunted by past and future. In every one of his artful stories, you鈥檒l hear 鈥榯he ghost of another conversation bleeding through the wires.鈥欌濃擪aren Russell, judge, 2015 John Simmons Short Fiction Award
