King Of The Yellow Jackets — John Pesta

A little boy who thinks he can speak with bees. A man haunted for life by a childhood secret. A woman's obsession with her husband's obsession with pin-up models. In this anthology collecting a lifetime of short-story writing, John Pesta tells deeply human stories through characters whose experiences are equal parts haunting, funny and poignant, whether the setting is a 1950s childhood or an imagined, and slightly twisted, near future. Many of these stories originally appeared in acclaimed literary magazines including Sou'wester, Prairie Schooner and The Bridge. A few make their debut here in this anthology. All draw upon a life spent observing intriguing people and their enigmatic lives - fiction inspired by Pesta's Italian-Hungarian upbringing in Pennsylvania, his years spent in academia as a professor of English literature, and decades devoted to editing a historic newspaper in the heart of small-town America.