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The Natural Order of Things

Part of Vintage Contemporaries

Author Kevin P. Keating

Paperback

$14.95 US

Knopf | Vintage

5.2"W x 8"H x 0.67"D | 9 oz | 24 per carton

On sale Apr 08, 2014 | 320 Pages | 9780804169271

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From a startling new voice in American fiction comes a dark, powerful novel about a tragic city and its inhabitants over the course of one Halloween weekend.

Set in a decaying Midwestern urban landscape, with its goings-on and entire atmosphere dominated and charged by one Jesuit prep school and its students, parents, faculty, and alumni, THE NATURAL ORDER OF THINGS is a window into the human condition. From the opening chapter and its story of the doomed quarterback, Frank McSweeney, aka The Minotaur, for whom prayers prove not enough, to the end, wherein the school's former headmaster is betrayed by his peers in the worst way possible, we see people and their oddness and ambitions laid out bare before us.

After working as a boilermaker in the steel mills in Ohio, KEVIN P. KEATING became a professor of English and began teaching at Baldwin Wallace University, Cleveland State University, and Lorain County Community College. His essays and stories have appeared in more than fifty literary journals, and his first novel, The Natural Order of Things, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes’ Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. His second novel, The Captive Condition, will be released by Pantheon Books in July of 2015. He lives in Cleveland. View titles by Kevin P. Keating

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"A dark and utterly compelling work with an unnervingly resonant vision of our present age. Excellent work by a fine young writer." --Robert Olen Butler

"Reading The Natural Order of Things is like holding a tattered masterpiece in your hands-- individually the pieces are their own small works of art but the true brilliance isn't realized until you fit them together."-- J.W. Schnarr, author of Alice & Dorothy

"Here is Kevin Keating, rallying against that tired old complaint, "Where are the new American voices?" He writes with verve, knowing, and wit--an explorer of the thin but deep fissure between privileged Jesuit school boys and the scrape-by world that surrounds it. Here, then, a wild exploration of the places and people that we wish we had the courage to begin. And now we can. Thanks to Kevin Keating's vision."--Michael Garriga, author of The Book of Duels

"A darkly brilliant, sometimes disturbing odyssey that lays bare the human condition."--Barry Goodrich, Cleveland Magazine

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