Roughhouse gives a harrowingly deadpan account of the tedium, casual violence and deviant sex that connect a surreal, semi-rural childhood with adult urban neurosis. Terse flashes of narrative, told from the point of view of a troubled youth, provide a stark sketch of an American family on the brink: a gun-toting father prone to inexplicable rages; a mother who speaks in ineffectual, half-remembered Chinese homilies; siblings rendered almost mute from excessive bleakness. And there's the narrator himself, who responds to the torment of home and neighborhood bullies with increasingly...

Guess and Check is a Giron/Valdez Series for Unique Voices in Literature Book

"A stark, engrossing, Hemingway-esque portrait of a life spent in the margins."
--Kirkus Reviews

" . . . tough and funny and touching and harrowing."
--John Barth

..".Guess and Check is spare, subtle and deadpan, Charles Simic married to Joyce Carol Oates. A beautifully constructed delicate narrative, a near dream of a book, a place 'vulnerable to anyone who wants to break through the glass.'"
--Terese Svoboda, author of...