If You Need Me Ill Be Over There [Paperback]

After the Plains queered him, Dave Madden decided to return the favor. This outstanding collection of short stories tells the tale of a different kind of differenceone not set in the glittering lights of New York or Los Angeles, but in the grand and wide American Midwest. For Maddens characters, their queerness is part of the environment, like the soil, the sky, and the supermarket: an HIV-positive chemist uses football to connect with his brothers; a 17-year-old girl tussles with a cartoon cobra to avoid thinking about the mother who abandoned her; and a hotel concierge starts attending Mass even though his partner was molested by a priest. In seeking out the ordinary struggles of extraordinary people trying to figure out their place within families and communities, Madden masterfully explores what it means to be an outsider always looking in.

A wry, deliciously smart sensibility presides over the magnificently multi-tentacled?If You Need Me Ill Be Over There. The title story?alone is worth the price of admission, delivering the book to a place of exquisite, wondrous tenderness. Dave Madden is a protean talent and his story collection is a treasure trove.2016 Foreword Indies Finalist, LGBT category

Acknowledgements
Pamela
Karl Friedrich Gauss
Smear the Queer
If You Need Me Ill Be Over There
An Uneven House
Little Fingers
If You Need Me Ill Be Over There
Another Mans Treasure
Irgendwo, Nirgendwo
We All Have Difficult Jobs
If You Need Me Ill Be Over There
Reading Group Guide

Dave Madden is author of The Authentic Animal: Inside the Odd and Obsessive World of Taxidermy. His shorter work has appeared in Harpers, Prairie Schooner, The Rumpus, DIAGRAM, The Normal School, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of the Sherwood Anderson Award in fiction, an AWP Intro Journals Award in nonfiction, a Bernard De Voto Fellowship at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship at lCØ