Driving in Cars with Homeless Men: Stories [Paperback]

ALibrary JournalBest Book of 2019
Finalist, 2019 Foreword Indies Award

Driving in Cars with Homeless Menis a love letter to women moving through violence. These linked stories are set in the streets and the bars, the old homes, the tiny apartments, and the landscape of a working-class Boston. Serena, Frankie, Raffa, and Nat collide and break apart like pool balls to come back together in an imagined post-divorce future. Through the gritty, unraveling truths of their lives, they find themselves in the bed of an overdosed lover, through the panting tongue of a rescue dog who is equally as dislanguaged as his owner, in the studio apartment of a compulsive liar, sitting backward but going forward in the galley of an airplane, in relationships that are at once playgrounds and cages.Homeless Menis the collective story of women whose lives careen back into the past, to the places where pain lurks and haunts. With riotous energy and rage, they run towards the future in the hopes of untangling themselves from failure to succeed and fail again.
 “Wisel’s prose is strobelike, illuminating the gritty landscape with small, powerful details. . . This dynamic—and often harrowing—collection beautifully spotlights lives that are rough around the edges; not standard fare but highly recommended.”—Library JournalStarred Review
 “Gritty in the best sense. These stories offer up hard granules of truth about contemporary wl“+