In the Devil's Territory — Kyle Minor

A collection of stories and novellas about the choices we face and where those decisions lead us, including “A Day Meant to Do Less,” a Best American Mystery Stories 2008 selection.

A schoolteacher escapes East Berlin at night, swimming the Spree River three times carrying elderly relatives on her back, so she can make her way to West Palm Beach, Florida, and “ruin the lives of fifth grade boys.” A young husband reckons with the likelihood that his wife's troubled pregnancy will end with her death before Christmas. A preacher bathes his ill and elderly mother, not knowing that she has mistaken him for the long-lost cousin she watched murder his brother in her father's tobacco field. In six stories that read like novels in miniature, Kyle Minor plumbs the depths of human mystery, where they meet our kindnesses and our cruelties, our generosities and our pettiness.

Kyle Minor's work has appeared widely in magazines and anthologies, among them Best American Mystery Stories 2008, The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, Surreal South, and Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers: The Best New Voices of 2006. His work has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Kyle received his MFA from Ohio State University and is currently a visiting professor at the University of Toledo.