Thieves I&39ve Known Stories [Paperback]

TOM KEALEY is the author of The Creative Writing MFA Handbook. His stories have appeared in Best American Nonrequired Reading, Glimmer Train, Story Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, and the San Francisco Chronicle. His nonfiction has appeared in Poets and Writers and The Writer. He received his MFA in creative writing from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he received the Distinguished Teaching Award. Tom has taught creative writing at Stanford University since 2003.

In these wondrously strange and revealing stories, Tom Kealey chronicles the struggles and triumphs of the young and marginalized as they discover many ways of growing up.

Their names are Merrill, Omar, Shelby, Laika, Winston, and Toomey, but most people don’t see them. They are boxers in training and the children of fishermen. They are altar boys in a poverty-stricken parish. They are assistant groundskeepers and assistant camel-keepers. They travel with the circus, care for disabled siblings, steal police cars, and retrieve the stolen boots of a priest. Ranging in abode from Puget Sound, Washington, to Pamlico Sound, North Carolina, they are abandoned yet courageous and plucky children and teenagers living on the edges of society.

Thieves I’ve Known is a collection of powerful, moving stories about the lives of a redemptive and peculiar cast of young characters who become easy to know and difficult to forget.

Tom Kealey might be my favorite short story writer and this astonishing collection is long overdue.

I’ve never gotten such a sense of place from a collection of stories that so spans the nation. Kealey’s characters are survivors, orphans spiritual and legal, living in an America where real joy and real l3“