The story was published in The Missouri Review in fall of 2020 and was later selected by Michael Beyers for their 2021 Peden Prize.
Best American Short Stories 2018
The story that I co-wrote with my wife Charlotte Pence was listed as “Other Distinguished Stories of 2017.” Thank you to Adam Ross at Sewanee Review for giving this story a home.
“The Profane and the Sacred”
The grossest story I’ve ever written. At least it’s really short!
Men attempt to negotiate between their baroque imaginations and the realities of their actual lives in a dark, comic, nuanced, sexed-up collection of stories.
“Women can learn more from these stories than from thousands of issues of Cosmopolitan.”
– Ellen Gilchrist, author of Victory Over Japan and Nora Jane
“These stories scared the hell out of me.”
– Brad Watson, author of Aliens in the Prime of their Lives
“. . . a writer who understands the intimacy of violence and the violence of intimacy, a writer you read again and again and again.”
– Bret Anthony Johnston, author of Corpus Christi
“. . . dangerous as a knife fight.”
– Michael Knight, author of The Typist
“. . . building to a bittersweetly charged final moment that left me with both tears and goosebumps—and made me want to immediately turn back to the first page of the collection and read the whole thing again!”
“I read one, sometimes two of these before sleep, and every night there was a whole little world I had entered and lived in for thirty minutes or an hour, then exited a different person. It’s very satisfying, complete experience and Prince makes it a lot of fun.”
“And to be sure, it is this sense of control that makes these stories so engaging; even instances of humor, like those in “Tranquility,” are tinged with threat, a haunting reminder of the close relationship between laughter and fear.”
“Probably the thing that is frightening about reading these stories, as a man, is that someone is unafraid to let the secrets out. Or maybe it is just that Adam Prince is just so damn gifted that he makes you wonder why other authors don’t pull these response from you. Read these stories.”
“Adam Prince’s collection of short stories promises to keep us on edge, emotionally itchy–like sitting on an old sofa with a broken spring poking into our thigh.”
Dr. Adam Prince 