PRESS RELEASE: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Hollywood, Los Angeles, California
September 2018
The Rink Girl
A Short Story Collection
WINNER OF PRIZE AMERICANA
Hollywood Books International
ISBN 9780996777988
143 pages
6 x 9
$15.00
A grandfather reluctantly raising his seven-year-old granddaughter throws her a birthday party to which no one comes—and she’s delighted. A former hockey player, about to become a father, suffers flashbacks to times his coach sexually abused him. A one-time Olympic hopeful reveals the heartbreaking reason she failed to land her signature jump—and thereby frees herself to find her next passion. Winner of Prize Americana, The Rink Girl may have a small geographic setting—an ice arena in an unassuming Ohio town—but it’s wide in thematic scope: from depression and war to the perils and pleasures of parenting and the thrill (and aching brevity) of first love.
The Rink Girl will be available in September and officially launch 1 October 2018 with a reading in Morgantown, West Virginia.
REVIEWS
FAITH SHEARIN: The stories in Mark Brazaitis’s splendid new collection are connected by ice. The skating rink that rests at the center of these narratives is a powerful metaphor: a frozen, polished surface on which beauty and danger are precariously balanced. In these stories marriages fail and mothers die; a middle-aged woman resides with her younger self. Brazaitis writes: ‘The sounds of the Sherman Ice Arena are winter. Blades against ice sing like wind across a snow-filled sky. Conversation is as hushed as a landscape of new powder.’ Brazaitis is a gifted, athletic writer; The Rink Girl is a pleasure to read.
PAUL WYLIE, 1992 OLYMPIC SILVER MEDALIST: Mark Brazaitis has taken the ice rink and turned it into a space where real people live, dream, hope, hate, and fear. This is not your after-school-special view of the skating community, but a deep dive into the drama (and humor) of the characters who inhabit it. Brazaitis has an uncanny way of bringing to life heartbreaking, often quirky people you may or may not know from being around a rink, or any place where people are passionately pursuing outsized dreams with their entire being.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mark Brazaitis is the author of eight books, including The River of Lost Voices: Stories from Guatemala, winner of the 1998 Iowa Short Fiction Award; The Incurables: Stories, winner of the 2012 Richard Sullivan Prize and the 2013 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award in Prose; and Truth Poker: Stories, which won the 2014 Autumn House Press Fiction Competition. He also wrote the script for the award-winning Peace Corps film How Far Are You Willing to Go to Make a Difference?
CONTACT INFORMATION
Press Americana
Hollywood Books International
editor@americanpopularculture.com
https://americanpopularculture.com
