Solstice

The millennium is drawing to a close. Pratt, a young Floridian who’s just finished a prison sentence he both did and didn’t deserve, is looking to start a new life. But will he be able to shake his shady past? Brimming with tension, action, wry dialogue, and unexpected pathos, Penalties of June is John Brandon’s sixth book published by McSweeney’s. With his distinct feel for the underbelly of his home state of Florida, Brandon takes readers into the forbidding corners of the Tampa Bay area--unsavory motels, secondhand shops, no-frills diners, and dubious used-car lots. Pratt navigates crime bosses and drug dealers on a perilous mission, his steed a trusty (if creaky) Chrysler LeBaron. Faced with an impossible choice, and the prospect of finally finding love after years behind bars, Pratt risks it all for a chance at making things right.

John Brandon has published five previous books with McSweeney’s--the novels Arkansas, Citrus County, A Million Heavens, and Ivory Shoals, and the story collection Further Joy. Arkansas was adapted into a movie of the same name starring Liam Hemsworth, Vince Vaughn, and John Malkovich. Citrus County was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Award and was reviewed on the cover of the New York Times Book Review.

Brandon has been awarded the Grisham Fellowship at Ole Miss and the Tickner Fellowship at Gilman School in Baltimore, and he has received a Sustainable Arts Foundation Fellowship. His short fiction has appeared in ESPN the Magazine, Oxford American, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Mississippi Review, Subtropics, Chattahoochee Review, Hotel Amerika, and other publications, and he has written about college football for GQ.com and Grantland. He was born in Florida and now resides in Minnesota, where he teaches at Hamline University in St. Paul.