Rick DeMarinis

The Coming Triumph of the Free World

"DeMarinis is a wizard shaking to its literary roots the short-story genre."—Matthew Gilbert, Boston Globe

Rick DeMarinis possesses a power and an originality unique in contemporary American fiction. The Coming Triumph of the Free World, his second story collection, puts his flamboyant gifts on display: an amazing verbal energy, a blackly comic vision of the world as an immense booby trap, and a technical virtuosity that modulates from down-and-dirty realism to fractured fable to surreal and searing visions of madness.

"DeMarinis is a contemporary avatar of that tradition in American short story writing that, by way of Hawthorne, Melville, Faulkner, O'Connor, Welty and Cheever, is essentially religious and, because rooted in the everyday, comic. . . . His art, then, is comedy of a very high order."—Russell Banks, New York Times Book Review

"Compelling, incendiary concoctions . . . the kind of collection lesser writers yearn to create and readers long to return to."—Denise Gess, Philadelphia Inquirer

"These tales imply a chilly, brilliantly lit world on the brink of absolute darkness, chronicled with speedy, black-hearted élan."—Elizabeth Tallent, Los Angeles Times Book Review