MANSFIELD, Ohio – Main Street Books is welcoming Ohio authors Kevin P. Keating and Michael Garriga back to Mansfield this October. The two professors of English at Baldwin Wallace University visited last year and are back by popular demand with new books and a new talk. All writers and readers are welcome for an entertaining evening of book talk with these two charming and fascinating authors on Friday, Oct. 2 at 6 p.m.
After working as a boilermaker in the steel mills in Ohio, Keating became a professor of English and began teaching at Baldwin Wallace University, Cleveland State University, and Lorain County Community College. His essays and stories have appeared in more than 50 literary journals, and his first novel, “The Natural Order of Things,” was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes’ Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. His second novel, “The Captive Condition,”has just been released by Pantheon Books in July. He lives in Cleveland.
“The Captive Condition” is a chilling and deliciously dark novel about an idyllic Midwestern college town that turns out to be a panorama of depravity and a nexus of horror. The book delves into the deepest recesses of the human capacity for evil.
Keating’s previous book, “The Natural Order of Things,” is similarly dark. Comprised of 15 interconnected stories, this book is properly thought of as a novel in the tradition of Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio” or John Steinbeck’s “The Pastures of Heaven” — but with a gothic sensibility. The novel concerns the adventures and exploits of a small group of students, teachers, employees, and priests at a Jesuit prep school in a dying industrial city.
Garriga’s work has been published extensively in magazines and journals, including New Letters, the Black Warrior Review, storySouth, and the Southern Review. He has worked as a sound man in a blues bar, a shrimp picker, and a bartender, but currently teaches creative writing in the English department at Baldwin Wallace University. Garriga lives with his family outside of Cleveland.
Garriga’s book of flash fiction, “The Book of Duels,” was published in March 2014. The book explores the moments around the moments and what truly guided the combatants: courage, cowardice, hatred, or fear? Recounting conflicts as various in their form as they are in their notoriety — ranging from John Henry’s race against the steam engine, to the last legal cockfight in Louisiana, to Burr and Hamilton’s infamous moment — “The Book of Duels” captures the final moments of 33 duels in flash triptychs, considering each battle from three perspectives: each duelist separately, and then, finally, their witness. The result is a fascinating exploration, as fierce as it is darkly funny, of what becomes of the human spirit in the pressure cooker of conflict.
