Troublers

"Very seldom anymore do I come across a book that makes me feel like everything--anything--is possible. Troublers does. Walsh's tautly elegant language renders a world at once iconic and strange, one in which every action and sentiment seems lovingly considered, mercilessly dissected, and expertly defamiliarized. A terrific first book, Troublers points to a new way of doing literature." --Brian Evenson, author of Windeye

"Walsh's stories are so odd and wonderful that they seem to have been treasured from some heretofore nonexistent Eastern European country that should now, finally, be properly celebrated." --Rivka Galchen, author of Atmospheric Disturbances

"In Troublers, Rob Walsh entertains marvelous, profound little dances which never fail to twirl you somewhere you've never been. In his world, 'heartless betrayal is both the engine of modern television and a kind of stainless upholstery to which no ethical principal can stick.' But inside Troublers' beautifully rendered exterior lies a heart so pure. 'Let's poke the thing!?' as Walsh directs." --Terese Svoboda, author of Bohemian Girl

"This hilarious collection may likely be the most honest portrait of human behavior you will ever read. Using the fantastic as pitch and the sinister as yaw, each story steers you on a hovering journey over the bumbling, spellbinding fields of all that we lose and fail to understand." --Alissa Nutting, author of Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls

"Troublers wields a pace of the impending. Declarative, modest, wry. Like Faulkner, Walsh layers and interlaces, envelopes us in heat and dryness and longing." --J.A. Tyler, author of Colony Collapse

"It's pretty rare that a collection of short stories does anything for me beyond making me feel like I'm watching someone exercise. Rob Walsh, though, comes out of nowhere with Troublers, taking one insane premise after another and exploring them with sentences that catch you off guard at every turn. There's a story where a guy builds a playpen for his baby daughters and leaves them in the playpen for 40 years, until he dies. There's a woman who spends years digging a hole in her backyard for no specific reason. There's a baby who keeps waking its parents up in the middle of the night, touching their bodies strangely. Among the book's many tricks and traps and desperate people, it is the constantly stunning logic of Walsh's sentences that hold the ship together, at once both aurally resonant and bizarre, like, 'By glancing between my own bites, I supervised my wife's eating.' Overall, a good weapon kit of strange air for people who like Gordon Lish mashed against Matthew Derby and George Saunders after being locked in a closet for five years." --Blake Butler, author of SKY SAW