Officer Friendly: And Other Stories

The stories in this acclaimed debut all take place in the state of Maine—which quickly comes to stand for the state we’re all in when we face the moments that change our lives forever. Two roughneck hockey players are kicked off the team and forced to join the drama club. A young bartender at a party of coastal aristocrats has to deal with the surreal request to put a rich old coot out of his misery. Can a father defend his family if the diver helping to free the tangled propeller of their boat turns out to be a real threat?

With humor, a piercing eye, and a sense that danger often lies just around the corner, Robinson gives us a variety of vivid characters, wealthy and poor, delinquent and romantic, while illuminating the mythic, universal implications of so-called ordinary life. These stories are at once classic and modern; taken together, they bring the good news that an important, compassionate new voice in American fiction has arrived.

Lewis Robinson is the author of?Water Dogs?and?Officer Friendly and Other Stories, and winner of the PEN/Oakland-Josephine Miles Literary Award. A graduate of Middlebury College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he received a Whiting Award in 2003. He has taught in the Stonecoast MFA program at the University of Southern Maine, as well as at the University of Iowa, Colby College, and Stanford University. He lives with his wife and their daughter in Portland, Maine.