Like Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad and Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Kevin Clouther’s Maximum Speed moves across time and point of view to dramatize youth’s aftershocks. The unifying presence in three characters’ lives is Billy, an apprentice drug dealer in South Florida. His improbable appearance twenty years after his death reconnects Nick, Andrea, and Jim with each other and with the shared secret of their past.
These stories weave through time and place; through friendship, family, and estrangement; through those moments in and beyond control. The writing here is rich and propulsive; Clouther’s attention to language and story is seductive.”
Hypertext
Arriving nearly a decade since his much-lauded debut collection, We Were Flying to Chicago (2014), this wondrous book of linked stories is well worth the wait. While many tales were originally published alone, like sections in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad (2010) and Kate Walbert’s Our Kind (2004), these deftly interwoven stories now fit together like a mosaic…”
Booklist
These stories, dear listener, will put you in a mood.”
Between Two Covers, KVNO
Balancing heart and humor, Maximum Speed bears witness to the raw hope of youth and the bittersweet wisdom of age.”
Frances de Pontes Peebles, author of The Air You Breathe
With artistry and heart, Kevin Clouther has written a superbly crafted collection of linked stories.”
Patricia Ann McNair, author of Responsible Adults
Moving effortlessly between humor and heartbreak, these stories add up, as in the best linked collections, to a rich and varied world of tenderness and beauty.”
Nathan Oates, author of A Flaw in the Design
With wounded, spiked prose in the Chekhovian observational style, brightened with a humane levity of heart, Maximum Speed spins us around the maypole of the gouged lives of four friends.”
Tom Paine, author of Scar Vegas
In this striking debut collection, characters find unexpected moments of profound insight while navigating the monotony of daily life. Here we find a man who drives to the wrong mountain, a hubcap cleaner who moonlights as a karaoke star, and a deliveryman whose urgent letters have no willing recipient. While lulled by the deceptively simple rhythm of the ordinary, Kevin Clouther offers the instant before momentous change–the view over the cliff, the intake of breath before a decision, a glimpse of stark vulnerability, of faith and hope.
Clouther’s first collection of stories shows an ‘old’ talent–meaning, his sophistication in treatment and technique and his wise observations of the human condition have the feel of an author who has the experience of several story collections behind him.”
Booklist, starred
In each story, Clouther finds the magic, mystery and story-telling potential in an otherwise ordinary, everyday world.”
Iowa City Press-Citizen
The purpose of [Clouther’s] conceptual stories is to open a vein, tap into a raw emotion in the reader, and his beautiful, character-driven stories are case studies in those emotions. Clouther makes us feel, and then he gives our feelings skin.”
Heavy Feather Review
Kevin Clouther’s collection of short stories is further evidence that some of the most interesting literary fiction is coming out of small presses. . . I can confidently report that this is writing that’s unmistakably alive and feral. . . Dare I say that I hear Raymond Carver and Ernest Hemingway echoing in my head?”
David Abrams, The Quivering Pen
Kevin Clouther 