Synopsis

Childhood, parenthood, love, life, and toxic masculinity are explored by various narrators in Jeff Richards’s short story collection, Everyone Worth Knowing.

The men portrayed in these seventeen short stories struggle in relationships and mourn the loves of their past as they search for meaning, such as a remarried tourist who dreams of his dead wife, the jealous son of a barber who reimagines his failed relationship, or a college student who woos his girlfriend with his unusual apartment, and often hope to find clarity through work, like the boy who imagines he’ll discover what being a man is as he works one summer as a motel dishwasher, the government worker whose infertility and midlife crisis drive him to work as a ranch hand in Kansas, or a widowed preacher who seeks out guilt and inspiration in a brothel.

Approaching his flawed characters without judgment—including the one who refuses to wear a mask in the spring of 2020, to devastating results—in these tightly-written stories, Richards shows men who have brief violent urges against themselves and others. They drink too much. They have crushes and get divorced and watch their lives fall apart. And, finally, they attempt to overcome their directionless yearning and shame, and to understand their place in society.

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**Book Releases June 1st, 2021**

Excerpt

FROM “Riding The Fences”

Inspired by the Eagles song “Desperado”

An excerpt from Everyone Worth Knowing by Jeff Richards. Copyright 2021 Jeff Richards.

When Farris Kaiser was twelve years old, Tim Newton, his best friend, called him a “fairy.” He smashed Tim in the mouth. Tim touched his mouth and gazed at the blood in his hand. He charged his tormentor. Farris stepped aside and slugged his friend in the back of the head. Tim went down like a sack of cement. He didn’t get up. A teacher came by.

“What happened?” she asked.

“He called me a fairy,” explained Farris.

When he reached home, his father asked him to cut a switch from one of the willow trees by the driveway.

“Lean against the house with your back to me,” he said after Farris gave him the switch.

It was summer and he was in shorts, so he didn’t have to roll up his pants like he did in the winter when he got switched. He’d been a terror since he was young, so the switching came often, but this time he wasn’t going to take it. After a few stinging lashes on his calves, he whipped around, grabbed the switch, and started using it on his dad.

“You want to be a big boy, huh,” said his dad, throwing a punch at his son. Farris ducked, but the second one caught him on the chin and sent him sprawling to the ground. His mother ran out to the back porch.

“Stop that, Edgar,” she said.

“This boy beat up his best friend. Now it’s my turn to teach him a lesson,” said the old man as he reached down to grab Farris. But the boy knocked his father’s hands aside, jumped up, and ran for his bike.

He pedaled his bike down the dirt driveway, past the willow trees on either side of the front gate, until he came to the dirt road. He pedaled down the road to where it ended at the base of Elk Mountain. He hid the bike behind a tree and followed a trail for a mile, then into the underbrush until he came to the creek. About a quarter mile down the creek, he came to the cascades. He removed his shoes and most of his clothes except for his underpants, tiptoed carefully across the cascade because it was slippery with moss, sat down, and slid to a pool that was five feet deep, up to his neck. Cold and refreshing. He splashed around the pool for a while and thought that he wanted to be dead. All he had to do was stick his head under the water until he could no longer breathe. Not many people came here, so he supposed it would take them a couple of days to find him floating on his stomach in his underwear. He climbed out of the pool and lay on his back. Looking high up on the ridge of Elk Mountain, he spied a hawk gliding this way and that in the thermals. He turned his head when he heard a knocking noise. It was a redheaded woodpecker hammering on a dead tree. A bunny crept out from behind a rock and stared at him. He decided that he didn’t want to die, that what he actually wanted was to be as free as all the creatures in the woods.

About the Author

JEFF RICHARDS is the author of Open Country: A Civil War Novel in Stories and the domestic noir novel Lady Killer. His fiction, essays, and cowboy poetry have appeared in over 27 publications including Prick of the Spindle, Pinch, New South, and Southern Humanities Review and five anthologies including “Tales Out of School” (Beacon Press); “Letters to J.D. Salinger” (University of Wisconsin Press); and “Higher Education” (Pearson), a college composition reader. A fan of blues music, he lives in Takoma Park, Maryland, with his wife and two dogs and travels often to Colorado where his kids live.

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