CONTINGENCY STREET PRESS LLC

When in elementary school a P.E. teacher showed Biggie Bluestone the single leg takedown, it was love at first sight. From that moment, Biggie has gradually morphed into the running, lifting, perpetually training fiend that he is today at seventeen, a contender for the 1971 Illinois High School Wrestling Championship. All Biggie wants is to keep the world at arm’s length until the state tournament in February, when he’ll beat the legendary Rick Berkenmeier, whose photo from the newspaper Biggie has taped to the freezer door.

But the world intrudes. He falls in love with a mysterious girl after her car slides through a stop sign and hits Biggie on his nightly six mile run. His sister, Giselle, is involved in an accident that kills her best friend. The kids at school have ostracized Giselle, and he must find a way to lend her some of the cachet he has garnered as a star athlete. To sharpen his focus, Biggie adopts an alter-ego – Killer Kowalski, a fifties-era professional wrestler with a penchant for throat stomping, though off the mat, reputedly, a genuinely nice guy. 

The massiveness of Biggie’s consciousness, accumulated throughout the novel, measures up to the drama of the state tournament, where internal and external forces collide. The result is a novel rich in themes of loss, love, friendship, and dedication—but above all, honor.

In Balloon Theater, Steve Moncada Street explores the misunderstandings, satisfactions, self-deceptions, betrayals, and eventual (if tentative) understandings of well-intending people trying to discover their own particular frequencies.

For 13 years Presner has worked the graveyard shift at Tyson's 24-Hour News and Smoke. He is also an attorney (non-practicing), a playwright (unproduced), a weightlifter (non-Olympian), and a reader of detective novels (not literature). Presner is grieving. Presner the Remarkable is about the stories we tell ourselves after life spins out of control. It is a tragicomedy about one man's quarrel with fate. It’s a story about starting over, this time for good.

Each of the seven stories in The Missing, Tory Tuttle's luminous first collection, explores dislocation, whether from losing a child or the protection of a parent, or as a strategy to escape reality. These uniquely rendered portraits, often impressionistic, depict the accommodations one makes to survive a world frequently inhospitable to human desire and longing.