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praise
"Hilarious, strange and scarily smart, Josh Emmons' stories are filled with wisdom, precision and staggeringly beautiful sentences. Every one of these luminous tales startled and captivated me."
—Molly Antopol, author of The UnAmericans
“I enjoyed and admired every page of A Moral Tale. Josh Emmons has written an exquisitely strange and deeply intelligent suite of stories about love and desire, how we pursue, deny, and are ultimately—whether we like it or not—defined by both."
—Vu Tran, author of Dragonfish
“One grasps for parallels to Josh Emmons’ dispatches from human experience at its most non-sequitur. His stories of psychically wayward painters, teen hookers and their haunted inheritances, junkie stunt men without any stunts left, and all the cluster-romances that play out to classical fugues, are as singular as they are irresistible, as resonant later as they are gripping now.”
—Steve Erickson, author of Zeroville
“This is one of the best books I've read in ages—a whip-smart and painfully lucid collection of stories, full of haunting observations and astonishing sentences. Over and over again, these stories ask what it means to make a moral judgment, without ever making that judgment for us; they resist easy explanations and obvious resolutions, and leave us in a raw and reawakened state of human clarity.”
—Jess Row, author of Your Face in Mine
"With sentences of elegant and Jamesian precision, Josh Emmons creates in each of these stories entire worlds in which people try to redeem themselves, in melancholy and often hilarious fashion.”
—Susan Straight, author of Between Heaven and Here and Highwire Moon
“A Moral Tale and Other Tales builds in power as it's being read, one vital and singular narrative after another. Emmons' stories are unsentimental but ethical, blackly humorous yet compassionate, and every page is marbled with insight. This collection is like nothing you'll read this year or next.”
—Ken Kalfus, author of A Disorder Peculiar to the Country
