For Keepsies

Stories by Gary Fincke

October 1, 1993 • 5.5 x 8.5 • 192 pages • 978-1-56689-013-7

“This author’s first collection of short stories offers a nostalgic trip through American culture of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Set in Pittsburgh and the surrounding area, the stories deal specifically with the concerns of the blue-collar American male. ‘Short Stories’ takes place during a high school reunion where a friend who served in Vietnam confronts one who didn’t. ‘Grade Nine’ concerns unemployment and working on an assembly line. In ‘Nazi on the Phone,’ set at Kent State, two students try to track down a hate organization. All the stories are colored by the political attitudes of the Vietnam War. Draft dodging, the nuclear threat, and Martin Luther King Jr. are among the major issues evoked, but the stories also vividly depict the popular culture of an era—its music, college exams, and dating scene.” —Library Journal

About the Author

Gary Fincke has won numerous awards for his poetry and fiction, including a Bess Hokin Prize and a PEN Syndicated Fiction Project Award. He currently teaches at Susquehanna University in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania. For Keepsies is his first collection of stories.

Reviews

 

“For Keepsies presents us with a tangible sense of place—Pittsburgh and surrounding environs—and a memorable sense of time—that watershed of American culture and sensibility, the sixties. Gary Fincke’s vision of history is evoked through a rich range of particulars, from the major (Vietnam, Kent State, the assassination of Martin Luther King) to the trivial (popular music, building a dream house, a high school reunion); these stories display our recent past, but never cast it in the easy light of nostalgia. For Keepsies is a candid, honest unflinching look at what has made us the way we are today, and the epiphanies of these deftly open-ended tales combine to produce genuine pathos.” —Gordon Weaver, editor of The Cimarron Review

“With a keen ear for dialogue and an eye for the right detail, Gary Fincke creates lives that have slipped their middle-class moorings and gone inexplicably adrift. He guides us through the wreckage of these baffled hearts desperate to communicate themselves, and he dos it with an intelligence and wit that makes us all seem ultimately salvageable.” —Clint McCown, editor of The Beloit Fiction Journal

“This writer finds his people in that fold of life where you are inches from your heart’s desire, years from your last good time. In some cases you have exactly what you wished for, and how frightening that can be.” —Robert Olmstead, author of Trail of Heart’s Blood Wherever We Go and America by Land

“This author’s first collection of short stories offers a nostalgic trip through American culture of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Set in Pittsburgh and the surrounding area, the stories deal specifically with the concerns of the blue-collar American male. ‘Short Stories’ takes place during a high school reunion where a friend who served in Vietnam confronts one who didn’t. ‘Grade Nine’ concerns unemployment and working on an assembly line. In ‘Nazi on the Phone,’ set at Kent State, two students try to track down a hate organization. All the stories are colored by the political attitudes of the Vietnam War. Draft dodging, the nuclear threat, and Martin Luther King Jr. are among the major issues evoked, but the stories also vividly depict the popular culture of an era—its music, college exams, and dating scene.” —Library Journal