Coming Soon! January 21, 2025
The Bliss of Your Attention
A story collection that celebrates those who strive and fail and strive again.
If Joseph Campbell’s dictum—“follow your bliss”—has become inspiration and goad, accusation and cliché, then the characters in David Borofka’s The Bliss of Your Attention are all the more puzzled by what their futures portend. Their bliss is never clear nor independent of others, for the characters in these stories are ever in search of connection, understanding, as well as validation, even if the latter—unlike reality and cynicism—is in short supply.
As the narrator of “Live with It” tells her would-be novelist husband, “Learn to live with your disappointments. I mean I could give him the party line, you know, follow your bliss, etcetera, etcetera, but that’s where the disappointments come from, don’t they? I mean that’s where bliss leads if you’re no good at the thing that you think makes you happy.”
Hapless and bumbling though they may be, the characters in The Bliss of Your Attention continue to move forward despite all evidence to the contrary. As Paul Manseau noted, “The comedy of seeking is rarely so sympathetically portrayed as in Borofka’s hands; he captures perfectly the poignancy of dopey mortals dreaming and scheming to reach the divine.”
The Bliss of Your Attention will be available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop.org as well as Johns Hopkins University Press.
Advanced Praise
It’s easy to let yourself be lulled by a writer whose work you’ve been reading and admiring for more than thirty years. No matter how excited you might be at the prospect of another of their novels or story collections winding up in your hands, you think you know what to expect. But every now and then one of your favorites surprises you in the most exhilarating way, and that’s what David Borofka has done to me with this superb new collection. His prose is as graceful as ever, we’re in locations he has taken us to before, but these stories startled me again and again, taking turns I would never have imagined. This is his best book yet, an absolutely spectacular collection, the crowning achievement of one of the best short story writers in this country or any other.
—Steve Yarbrough, author of Stay Gone Days and The Unmade World
The bliss of David Borofka's writing is not only his multitude of characters in all their complex and tortured glory, but the author's voice on the page, both down to earth and reaching to the heavens. Referencing everything from the Bible, Shakespeare and Flannery O’Conner to the Raisin Queen of Selma, it’s the voice of a wise someone you want to spend time with. His stories teem with life, like a Hieronymus Bosch painting, colorful, pulsating, darkly humorous and utterly delightful. Examining the loopier aspects of these uncelebrated lives, Borofka shows us ourselves and the commonality of our quiet desperations.
—Nancy Spiller, author of Entertaining Disasters and Compromise Cake: Lessons Learned from My Mother’s Recipe Box
'With The Bliss of Your Attention, David Borofka has given us a master-class in short-story writing, and he has managed this with a cast of characters that hasn’t a whiff of charisma: worn-down teachers, writers who can’t publish, engineers, universally loathed hospital administrators, priests and ministers who can’t comfort anyone, little fat kids who can’t stop crying, worthless dogs, a boy in a gorilla suit who can’t even manage the minor triumph that Enoch Emory achieves in Wise Blood. He can’t scare anybody and he’s scared himself.
I loved them all because they’re rendered with compassion, dark humor and the essential knowledge that a real writer holds about the human condition: We really don’t understand each other at all and the three most important words in any language are, in spite of.
—Lou Mathews, author of Shaky Town and L.A. Breakdown
Publication information
Johns Hopkins University Press
https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/53891/bliss-your-attention
Language: English
Paperback: 272 pages
ISBN-13: 978-1421450544
Release Date: January 21, 2025
Now available!
The End of Good Intentions
“History is a funny thing,” Michael Wayte says in The End of Good Intentions. “We don’t always know what’s significant. We hardly ever know what’s significant. What was important then might not be so now; what’s important now might not be later.” Beginning with a fire and a gruesome incident of self-sacrifice, the novel presents a Christian college in transition, from its midcentury Presbyterian origins to a more strident and politicized Evangelicalism.
Set between the mid-1970s and today, the novel moves back and forth through the turbulence of recent American history, charting the course of characters such as Michael Wayte, the pre-ministerial student who becomes the owner of a foothill bar; Leah Green, the Jewish student who finds herself a stranger in a strange Christian environment; Walter Book, the gay English professor, who doesn’t know he’s gay; and Eivar Mortenson, whose actions at the beginning of the novel become the catalyst for all that is to come.
In The End of Good Intentions, David Borofka examines the gap between desire and emptiness, conviction and extremism, those who believe absolutely in the certitude of their perspective and those who live on the outer margins of doubt and uncertainty.
Praise
If David Borofka were, say, a studio guitarist, he would be equally adept at jazz, rock, hip hop, country, reggae, fado—you name it. In The End of Good Intentions, his first novel in more than twenty-five years, he proves himself a master of tone and mood, perfectly capable of making you laugh and cry on the same page, or even sometimes in the same paragraph. He writes with unfailing sympathy of people so radically different from each other than one wonders if he couldn’t also be a superb actor if he chose. Thank goodness that he has elected to reserve his formidable skills for those of us lucky enough to be his readers. The End of Good Intentions is a treasure. So is its author.”
—Steve Yarbrough, author of Stay Gone Days and The Unmade World
The End of Good Intentions is an uncommonly well-written collage of a novel whose ironies, humanity, and insights will urge you to piece it together. Borofka’s fearlessness and topflight voice are not to be missed.
—Mark Wish, Founding Editor of Coolest American Stories and author of Watch Me Go and Necessary Deeds
Supplemental Materials
The End of Good Intentions (novel) is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop.org.
Other Books
A Longing for Impossible Things
A Longing for Impossible Things
A Longing for Impossible Things
Winner of the American Book Fest Award for the Short Story
"I'm a seeker," the narrator of "My Life as a Mystic" says. "A watcher of the skies. A pilgrim and a wanderer. I don't know, I couldn't stand law school." Such are the polar sentiments of the characters in the stories of David Borofka's A Longing for Impossible Things, which charts the yearning inherent in imperfect lives.
Taking their cue from Fernando Pessoa's "painful landscape" of longing for the impossible, the ministers and missionaries of "Fire" and "Coincidence" look for more than what they find in their respective theologies; they reject what they've been told in favor of what they feel. Meanwhile, everyday believers fall back upon their own intuition and pray for revelation to be forthcoming. Lovers are forced to recognize the finite limitations of their grand infatuations even as they hope for some small measure of long-lasting tenderness, while teenagers resign themselves to the inevitable disappointments of adult life, recognizing the threats that exist in a future that is yet to unfold. And, as the narrator of "Attachments for the Platonically Inclined" says in the context of a 300 game in bowling, "I can't help but be reminded of perfection when perfection was difficult to find. And impossible to hold onto. Reminded that there are moments when everything works as it is supposed to, a harmony beyond applause or appreciation from others."
Hints of His Mortality
A Longing for Impossible Things
A Longing for Impossible Things
The award-winning stories in David Borofka's Hints of His Mortality focus on the male of the species, on bewildered, guilt-ridden, hypersensitive characters adrift in a sea of changing roles and expectations. Although they yearn for the ideal—whether physical or spiritual—and for that sense of divine connection suggested by Wordsworth's Intimations of Immortality, they usually end up settling for what seems the next best thing: sex or religion.
The amorous scrimmage between male and female in these taut, intense stories is a contest that leaves no one unmarked. The hapless ministers in Borofka's memorable collection find that their daily grind of professional piety leaves them with more questions than answers. The men and boys in Hints of His Mortality are always aware of their flaws, for Borofka's vital characters have the capacity to register the shadows of their every blemish. Like Ferguson of the title story, haunted for twenty years by his failures of conscience, each protagonist experiences the inexorable fallibility of his own nature, agonizes over his moral weakness, and longs for escape from this life in which “our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting." Yet each is redeemed by his ongoing struggle for compassion and understanding.
Coolest American Stories 2023
A Longing for Impossible Things
Coolest American Stories 2023
America’s most talented storytellers share their most interesting, engaging, unputdownable work in a collection made for story lovers.
Praised early on by numerous award-winning and bestselling authors, COOLEST AMERICAN STORIES 2023 is the second volume of the annual short story anthology whose guiding philosophy is that a collection of widely appealing short stories can make for common ground that could unite rather than divide Americans.
Toward this end, COOLEST AMERICAN STORIES 2023 features a previously uncollected heartbreaking story by Morgan Talty, author of the widely acclaimed Night of the Living Rez; a witty story about growing up fast by widely published crime writer Nikki Dolson; and a candid tale about motherhood in the wake of tragedy by T.E. Wilderson.
And since interesting storytelling―rather than a bunch of publishing credits―matters most to story-hungry readers, COOLEST AMERICAN STORIES 2023 also includes a page-turner about celebrity stalking written by brand new author Georgia Smith; a previously unpublished and sensual story about love versus the American Dream by up-and-coming author Patricia García Luján; and R.C. Goodwin's striking tale about a dying parent's wish―among others in this treasure trove of unputdownable, sharply written, sometimes comic, sometimes frightening, always suspenseful stories loaded with twists and turns.
The Island
Things in Heaven and Earth
Coolest American Stories 2023
While his parents shop for reconciliation in European furniture stores, 13-year-old Fish Becker is sent to spend the summer with Miles and Ariana Lambert. Ariana can't sleep for fear of who she'll be when she awakens, and Miles is touched, perhaps to a fault, by the romanticism we know first in our lives. While their visionary daughter, Mira, leads Fish through magic midnight rituals, their son introduces him to every kind of excess. Touched by a gentle humor that runs straight up against the isolation of human sadness, The Island is a rich coming-of-age story.
Things in Heaven and Earth
Things in Heaven and Earth
Things in Heaven and Earth
Novelist Fickett (The Holy Fool) collects the writings of novelists like Doris Betts, Madeleine L'Engle, Ron Hansen and Susan Bergman on their experiences with the supernatural. The 14 contributors, who also include philosophers (Deal Hudson) and lawyers (Phillip E. Johnson), write openly about such topics as signs and wonders, miracles, revelation and the relationship between science and the supernatural. In his introduction, Fickett remarks that the writers he has chosen for this project are "hard thinkers and eloquent witnesses to their experience" of the supernatural. In his startling reflection, "Underland," novelist David Borofka chronicles his bouts with depression and concludes that heaven and earth are so much a part of each other that the transcendent is found peeking through our ordinariness in little moments of insight. In a reflection both comic and profound, "The Way of Imperfection," Erin McGraw offers a parody of Teresa of Avila's The Way of Perfection as she searches for, and finds, a spiritual model "who rejoiced when she found her Lord in everyday chores." Finally, Hudson recalls the work of French Catholic thinker Jacques Maritain and urges, like Maritain, that the supernatural be restored to philosophy. Fickett's collection offers elegant meditations from writers who are attentive to the mystery of the transcendent in everyday life.
Publishers Weekly
Walking on Water
Things in Heaven and Earth
Things in Heaven and Earth
Walking on Water gathers together an engaging and compelling collection of short stories by 24 of the many talented writers to have graduated from The University of Alabama's Program in Creative Writing
over the past 20 years. Editor Allen Wier, who taught fiction writing at Alabama from 1980 to 1994, offers us in this celebration of writing a variety of fictional voices that represent widely differing sensibilities and visions. Some stories are by writers whose literary careers are well begun, while others appear here in print for the first time. Wier named the collection after the story by Kim Trevathan, this author's first published fiction, because walking on water is such an apt figure for what the fiction writer attempts with each new story's beginning.
Walking on Water is an outstanding anthology, surprising in the rich variety of its voices and stances, extraordinary in the sustained quality of all of the 24 stories.