Collection
A Fine Day Will Burn Through

Hollywood and Japan. The South and Midwest. Outer space and back home. Past and present. Myths and truths. Expectations and desires. Animals and humans. A storage locker and a softball game. A school play and an art installation. A bar mitzvah and an old tattoo. William Auten’s new fifteen-story collection A Fine Day Will Burn Through (includes stories first published in Thoughtful Dog, BULL, museum of americana, The McNeese Review, Barely South Review, Slush Pile Magazine, and Valparaiso Fiction Review) bridges cultures and explores how people of all ages try to reach for—and sometimes miss—each other. In circumstances both mundane and surprising, these characters wend their way through a contemporary world of excess and restraint, noise and silence, urgency and patience, regret and grace.
2021
286 pages
ISBN (print): 9780578866567
ISBN (ebook): 9780578866604
Praise
Some books of short stories are all the same. Not this one. Each story is different: a different main character, different plot, different situation the characters find themselves in. An excellent book—both stimulating and therapeutic.
—BookWorm
Select Publications
Barely South Review (2019 Norton Girault Literary Prize in Fiction), Bluestem, BULL, Crab Orchard Review, The Dead Mule School of Literature, District Lit, Gravel, Illuminations, McNeese Review, the museum of americana, Permafrost, Sequestrum, Sliver of Stone, Slush Pile Magazine, Solstice, Split Lip, Superstition Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Valparaiso Fiction Review