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Hoaxes and Other Stories
Brian DiNuzzo
Winner of the 2022 North Texas Book Festival Book Award for short stories.
“Fakery is explored in almost all of these inventive stories. After relationships end and jobs don’t work out, protagonists are often left wondering, like the narrator of the titular story, what value they held. Were they even real?”
—Chris Fink, author of Add This to the List of Things That You Are
A small-time celebrity keeps dying. A Bigfoot hunter and his grandson give presentations on the elusive beast. A disgruntled office drone reaches his breaking point and quits, in the middle of a zip-line trust fall.
The characters populating Brian DiNuzzo’s debut short story collection may be eccentrics, but at their core they are struggling to get through life, dealing with unmanageable bosses and tedious jobs, and trying to maintain their interpersonal and romantic relationships. These are people seeking to improve their circumstances, people striving for utopia but willing to accept much less. Frustrated and weary, downtrodden and misguided, they still hold out for the dim light of hope.
DiNuzzo navigates ordinary settings—Southern California, South Philadelphia, suburban and city streets, office buildings, derelict apartment complexes, the public library, the airport, the shopping mall—with quirky characters and odd situations. These stories ask us to wonder how falsehoods pervade private life. Through his twelve distinct tales, DiNuzzo asks: What’s real? What’s fake? Does it matter?
Brian DiNuzzo is a writer and educator based in Allentown, NJ. His short stories have won several awards and have appeared in The Lindenwood Review, Qwerty, Echo Ink Review, and other publications.
Praise
“The stories in DiNuzzo’s inventive, mischievous debut collection come straight at the reader. . . . He understands the importance of loving human relationships. The writer is off to a strong start.”
—Publishers Weekly
“This one collection I would recommend reading. The author is new to the game but brings a backpack full of creative offerings.”
—Jennie Rosenblum, Jennie Reads
“Dinuzzo’s prose is elegant, intelligent, and razor’s-edge shrewd. . . . As Franz Kafka demurs, ‘We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.’ Hoaxes and Other Stories suggests Brian Dinuzzo is a lumberjack on ice skates. It was not what I expected, and the promise and possibilities of Dinuzzo’s writing may be vast and uncharted.”
—E.R. Bills, Fort Worth Weekly
Table of Contents
Contents
Hoaxes
The Storm
Valentina
The Censor
Undeniable Proof of the Bigfoot
Victories
Clones
The Pub Runner
The Dying Mall
The Hero’s Embrace
Leaving
The Sisters
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Larger images
April 2022
LC: 2021038759 PS
170 pp. 5.5 x 8.5
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