"Accomplished, masterfully plotted, and engrossing. With Truth Poker, Mark Brazaitis is at the top of his game." Ann Pancake, author of Strange as This Weather has Been
"The fifteen stories in Truth Poker display a potent narrative talent. Mark Brazaitis' imaginative energy puts us into different places, regions, countries, and characters, establishing him as a writer of impressive range. "The Blind Wrestler," the book's first story, sounds one of the themes that runs throughout the collection. Sometimes scary, sometimes funny, Brazaitis' best stories upset lazy expectations, disturb us, make us reflect upon the question of what matters most, and move us toward seeing and insight." Peter Makuck, author of Allegiance and Betrayal
"Brazaitis' cycle of linked stories revolving around the small Midwestern town of Sherman, Ohio, pulls off... this trick of drawing us into an ordinary, provincial world and then startling us with some moral, physical or—most often—mental deformity among the people who live there... The figures at the centre of his narratives are sometimes lonely or needy or deluded in the extreme; furthermore, their conditions are often contagious, hereditary or irremediable... The Incurables deserves a lasting place among regional story cycles; it brings small-town Ohio palpably alive and combines a comic relish for the bizarre with a tenderness towards human frailty." Times Literary Supplement
"I was thoroughly and magically transported by The River of Lost Voices. These are tender, beautiful, touching stories about a Guatemala that is at once strange and universal. this is a remarkable collection from a new writer with major talent." Robert Olen Butler, author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
"When you finish these wonderful stories about life in a small Guatemalan town, you might feel as if they were a dream you just had. Funny, strange, sad, and exquisite things happened, and there were so many marvelous and perturbing details that you can't get them out of your head; their mood takes you over like the afternoon rains." Francisco Goldman, author of The Long Night of White Chickens
"In Julia & Rodrigo Mark Brazaitis takes Romeo and Juliet and wonders what becomes of impossible love when the lovers cannot simply die... What's most tragic, Brazaitis knows, is that in Julia's and Rodrigo's greatest love—like the bloody Guatemala Civil War that surrounds it—none can win, and all of it is so unnecessary." Tony D'Souza, author of Whiteman, The Konkans, and Mule
"...Julia and Rodrigo rise above old-fashioned customs of marriage and religious worship only to collide with events they cannot control. Ultimately, this finely crafted novel goes a long way toward answering the question of whether human free will can overcome fate, or God's will." Thaddeus Rutkowski, author of Haywire, Tetched, and Roughhouse
"While the stories in An American Affair are united by various connections between Americans and Latin Americans, there is much more going on here besides culture clashes. These stories explore the complexities beneath our everyday lives, no matter where we live or have lived, no matter who we love or have loved. Mark Brazaitis inhabits a wide range of characters who want something more, who have to cope with dashed expectations, with time and memory's betrayals. 'It is hard to lie in a foreign language,' Brazaitis writes. These rich, evocative stories deal with the nuances of truth and the inadequacy of language to express or even find truth, even when lying is made more difficult." Jim Daniels, author of Detroit Tales
"Mark Brazaitis' The Other Language delights in the strangeness of the day-to-day and the familiar of the 'other.' Exuberant, brilliantly alive, vulnerable, and wise, these poems pay passionate attention to our world. The narratives of Mark Brazaitis offer a nimble blend of politics, cultures (pop and not), mythologies, and brash tenderness." — Denise Duhamel, author of Two and Two
The Rink Girl: Stories
