The Next New World

The "chameleon-like" ABA–winning author of Easy in the Islands offers a new collection of eight "surprising [and] memorable" short stories ( Publishers Weekly).   The haunting stories in Shacochis's second collection combine comic wit and carnal certainty with an aura of history. Each of the eight tales here feature outrageously original characters who, through Shacochis's ability to inhabit a spectacular range of voices, become eerily familiar. Two elderly sisters share a phantom lover; a Virginia patriarch, haunted by ghosts of Confederate soldiers, is buried with their bones; a family celebrates the Fourth of July in the shadow of the father's Alzheimer's syndrome; and a musician's thunderous love turns him into a cannibal.   From renaissance England to Cape Hatteras to the Caribbean islands, readers will find themselves submerged in exquisitely crafted fictions "charged with wit and style . . . intelligent, engaging, and richly realized." ( The New York Times Book Review).   "Shacochis is a master of voices. . . . In The Next New World he roams about through history and across the globe, tethering his wit to a sense of political conscience. . . . Sometimes more is more." — The Miami Herald   "If we are in the golden age of the short story, Bob Shacochis is one of the writers who got us here." — Providence Journal