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IN JUST THE RIGHT LIGHT

$18.95

Rust Belt, USA, where steel is dead, hope is scarce, and hardship is a way of life. Miles Junction is but one of many Northeastern Ohio towns long forgotten and left behind, its residents living on the cusp of financial, emotional, even spiritual destitution. An old trapper becomes the scapegoat for a boy’s brutal murder. An out-of-work diesel mechanic resorts to crime in order to provide for his wife and son. A teenage girl braves a brutal winter storm to protect a tragic secret. A recovering drug addict wrestles with temptation and bears the weight of an uncertain future. These and the other working-class characters that populate this collection know struggle intimately and understand that desperate times often call for desperate measures. Their lives are linked by a ruined yet starkly beautiful post-industrial landscape—a desolate vestige of our fractured American dream. Taking place during the last few decades of the twentieth century and those following the new millennium, IN JUST THE RIGHT LIGHT is a glimpse at one region’s bleak inheritance and the precarious lives of those who remain to rummage through the fallout of its past. 

Rust Belt, USA, where steel is dead, hope is scarce, and hardship is a way of life. Miles Junction is but one of many Northeastern Ohio towns long forgotten and left behind, its residents living on the cusp of financial, emotional, even spiritual destitution. An old trapper becomes the scapegoat for a boy’s brutal murder. An out-of-work diesel mechanic resorts to crime in order to provide for his wife and son. A teenage girl braves a brutal winter storm to protect a tragic secret. A recovering drug addict wrestles with temptation and bears the weight of an uncertain future. These and the other working-class characters that populate this collection know struggle intimately and understand that desperate times often call for desperate measures. Their lives are linked by a ruined yet starkly beautiful post-industrial landscape—a desolate vestige of our fractured American dream. Taking place during the last few decades of the twentieth century and those following the new millennium, IN JUST THE RIGHT LIGHT is a glimpse at one region’s bleak inheritance and the precarious lives of those who remain to rummage through the fallout of its past. 

Praise for IN JUST THE RIGHT LIGHT

“In Just the Right Light is a book of snapshots and alleyways leading us to heartbreak, tough choices and tiny victories. These stories continually challenge and return us to our own shortcomings and a world in need of repair….Together, these stories are a collection of risks. And American prose needs more risks like them.”

Eric Wasserman, author of Celluloid Strangers and The Temporary Life

“William R. Soldan’s people live with the realities of violence and terrible childhoods, jail and hard living. In story after story, there’s a craftsman’s eye for undiluted heart-crushing detail that can kill you with a simple-sounding sentence, stories in which a hundred bucks might cure everything and heroin addicts and twelve-steppers alike go off-course one last time before foundering in new but not exactly better waters. These stories are rock-solid revelations.”

Rusty Barnes, author of Reckoning and Knuckledragger

“William R. Soldan packs each story in explosives, ‘Like an uncoiled copperhead,’ the surging momentum of his masterful prose penetrates us, then hurls us into the tragic microcosm of life.”

Meg Tuite, author of Bound by Blue and Meet My Haze

“Soldan is a master craftsman.”

Meagan Lucas, author of Songbirds and Stray Dogs

“Unflinching and haunting . . . Soldan is the kind of writer we need right now.”

Robert Vaughan, author of Funhouse and Askew

“Soldan’s characters are thoroughly wrought, so much so that even the most hardscrabble and damaged character becomes someone to root for.”

Len Kuntz, author of This Is Why I Need You

“In Soldan’s work we find men beaten down by circumstance, women made fierce by necessity, barroom poetics to rival early Waits or Springsteen or Townes van Zandt, and—most surprisingly—a gentleness for these things that most writers only bestow on that which is much softer.”

Alex DiFrancesco, author of All City and Transmutation

 

About WILLIAM R. SOLDAN

Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1982, William R. Soldan grew up in and around the Rust Belt city of Youngstown, Ohio, with a brief stint in the hills of southern Oregon. A high school dropout and college graduate, he holds a BA in English Literature from Youngstown State University and an MFA from the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts program. Over the years, he has been employed as a factory machinist, maintenance man, house painter, record store clerk, line-cook, bartender, bouncer, writing instructor, personal trainer, and a host of other things. William’s work draws greatly from the urban and rural landscapes of the post-industrial Midwest–the stark beauty, the resonant history, the strength and endurance of its grappling working-class.

Three times nominated for a Pushcart Prize, as well a nominations for Best of the Net and Best Small Fictions, William’s work appears in publications such as New World Writing, Elm Leaves Journal, Thuglit, Reckon Review, Tough, The Best American Mystery Stories 2017 (with a distinguished mention in 2018), and many others. His books include the story collections In Just the Right Light (Unsolicited Press, 2019), Lost in the Furrows (Cowboy Jamboree Press, 2020), and Houses Burning and Other Ruins (Shotgun Honey Books, 2021); the poetry collection So Fast, So Close (Close to the Bone Publications, 2020); and, most recently, the novel Undone Valley (Cowboy Jamboree Press, 2021).

William currently resides in Youngstown with his wife and two children and can be found on Twitter @RustWriter1.

 

  • Genre: Fiction

    ISBN: 978-1947021853

    Publication Date: March 12, 2019