Nobody Knows How It Got This Good 

Amos Jasper Wright IV

Synopsis: Drawing heavily on the author's experiences growing up in Central Alabama, Nobody Knows How It Got This Good explores themes of racial injustice, class, the Civil Rights Movement, environmental catastrophe, imprisonment, suburbanization, and the perennial themes of love, life and loss.

Through sixteen stories sharing common environments and characters – a used car salesman, a cook on death row, a lynching survivor, a U.S. Census enumerator – Nobody Knows How It Got This Good, the author’s first short story collection, attempts to come to terms with the modern South. Though set in the Deep South, these stories aspire with humor and pathos to address national dilemmas.

"Wright offers stark stories from the contemporary Deep South in this debut collection... the thematic consistency is so strong that the reader leaves the book with the wondrous sense of having spent a lifetime among the crooks and malcontents of central Alabama and having come away much wiser for the experience.
A finely crafted collection that perfectly evokes a place and culture." - Kirkus Reviews

ISBN: 978-1-60489-208-0    Trade paper $16.95   Sale Price $8.95

ISBN: 978-1-60489-209-9    Hard Cover $25.95    Sale Price $13.95

312  Pages

Amos Jasper Wright IV is native to the dirt of Birmingham, Alabama, but has called Alabama, Massachusetts and Louisiana home. He holds a master's degree in English and creative writing from the University of Alabama, Birmingham, and a master's degree in urban planning from Tufts University. His fiction and poems have appeared in Arcadia, Birmingham Arts Journal, Clarion, Folio, Gravel, The Hollins Critic, Interim, New Ohio Review, Off the Coast, Pale Horse Review, Roanoke Review, Salamander, Tacenda Literary Magazine, Union Station Magazine, Yes, Poetry and Zouch. He is currently at work on several novels titled Petrochemical Nocturne, King Cockfight, The Dead Mule Rides Again, In the Basement of the Anthropocene, and When A Good Thing Lasts Too Long. For now he lives and works in New Orleans. His author website is available at www.amosjasperwright.com