A teen discovers a gun in the trunk of his car. A spider exposes a weakness a son has never seen. A young woman reaches a breaking point with her partner while traveling in Egypt. A serial philanderer uses the personal tragedy of September 11th to his advantage. In these stories and more, the author of He Who Shall Remain Shameless takes readers down paths punctuated by the mistakes of parents and children, teachers and students, spouses and significant others–imperfect people driven by love, yearning, violence, dysfunction, memory, misfortune and, ultimately, hope. Spanning three decades, the end of the 20th century through the early 2020s, The Fallible is a collection brimming with the unexpected.
Praise for The Fallible: Stories
“Each of these stories arrives with a pop of surprise. With their focus on American-style masculinity, self-doubt, and violence, stories ricochet off each other in especially satisfying fashion. Sometimes swaggering, sometimes fumbling, the narrators are all compelling, all the characters’ lives well worth examining. What a fine, ambitious collection The Fallible is.”
– Valerie Sayers, author of The Powers and The Age of Infidelity
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“The anxious characters in David Ewald’s The Fallible are teetering on the edges of the great disasters of our time—terrorist attacks, school shootings—and as they stumble through personal disasters of their own making, they must also grapple with their own place in a larger, darker America. With graceful prose and sharp dialogue, Ewald provides an unsettling and vivid sense of the intersection between the personal and the political that will leave you breathless.”
– Blake Sanz, author of The Boundaries of Their Dwelling and winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award
David Ewald: Teacher of teens, dad of tweens. Author of off-beat literary fiction and drama 