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by M. Randal O'Wain (Author)
M. Randal O'Wain's debut short story collection, Hallelujah Station and Other Stories, introduces readers to a wide and diverse cast of characters struggling with and responding to changes and loss.
These gritty and poignant stories follow the tragic parts of life, the pieces that may neither start nor end in comfortable resolution and the pieces that make up complex realities. In the first story, a former drug dealer reflects on a life-changing decision he made years ago that ended up hurting the person he most wanted to protect. Later in the collection, we meet a would-be robber who turns out to be the hero.O'Wain's characters are often deeply flawed or totally lost, but in each instance, these traits reveal the characters as real, compassionate, and, ultimately, human. Sprinkled with humor and heartache, O'Wain's stories bring us into contact with the curious, the tragic, and the authentic.
Author Biography
M. Randal O'Wain holds an MFA from Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program. He is the author of Meander Belt: family, loss, and coming of age in the working-class South (American Lives Series, 2019) and Hallelujah Station and Other Stories (Autumn House Press, 2020) His essays and short stories have appeared in Oxford American, Guernica, The Pinch, Booth, Hotel Amerika, storySouth, among others. O'Wain teaches both fiction and creative nonfiction in the creative writing program at the University of North Carolina and lives in Durham, NC.
