Books

In fifteen beautifully wrought stories―ranging from occupied Czechoslovakia to California’s Central Valley to the rainforests of the Pacific Northwest―Mark Slouka explores moments in life when our back is to the wall. One of the most forceful American writers of his generation, Slouka captures the depth and emotional range of an array of characters...

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The year is 1968. The world is changing, and sixteen-year-old Jon Mosher is determined to change with it. Racked by guilt over his older brother’s childhood death and stuck in the dead-end town of Brewster, New York, he turns his rage into victories running track. Meanwhile, Ray Cappicciano, a rebel as gifted with his fists as Jon is with his feet...

An immensely moving, powerfully romantic novel about the vagaries of love and the legacy of war, The Visible World is suffused with stories: fragments of European history, Czech fairy tales, and family secrets gleaned from overheard conversations.... 

Set in a tiny Czech community on the shores of Lost Lake, these stories chronicle three generations of men and women under the spell of a landscape with a powerful history...

“There comes a time in your life when the past decides to run you down,” Mark Slouka writes in this heartbreaking and soul-searching memoir about one man's attempt to reckon with the past....

Mark Slouka writes from a particular vantage point, one invoked by Thoreau, who wished "to improve the nick of time . . . to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future." At this bewildering convergence, Slouka asks us to consider what it means to be human and what we must revive, or reject, in order to retain our humanity in the modern world....

Born attached at the chest, Chang and Eng were considered a marvel, an act of God. By any standard, theirs is a history of epic variety and drama. Mark Slouka recounts their tumultuous story, from the docks of Vietnam to American fame, with intimacy and compassion...

Part cultural critique, part call to the ramparts, War of the Worlds is a funny, but eerily disturbing, humanist's look at the culture of cyberspace...