HIGHWAY TRADE

by John Domini

short stories and a novella

"Domini is a rare writer who doesn't bend his characters towards his own pre-determined ends, but follows where they lead." -- Jay Cantor

"Domini shows us the way we live...witty, biting portraits of todays men and women...strong sentences...and vivid scenes." -- Alan Cheuse

"Domini's prose is so stark and quick, it's as if a stroke of lightning burned the words into print." -- Janice Daugharty

"Fiery, crackling prose...a double-bladed humor...fearsomely entertaining and pleasurably dark...unforgettable." -- Diana Abu-Jaber

"[These] stories move swiftly and sinuously, emerging from the everyday to coil around a reader's heart." -- Floyd Skyloot

In Domini's novella ... and in most of the other stories, he postures to no apparent end; in terms of narrative, it seems, he has more to prove than to give. -- The New York Times Book Review, Norah Vincent

The reader will wonder at times at how the author can get inside the heads of characters whose backgrounds are so different from his own.... It's sometimes called giving blood, this kind of stand-up writing, and it's the juice that fuels "Highway Trade". -- The Oregonian July 5, 1998

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

John Domini has won awards in all genres, publishing fiction in Paris Review and Ploughshares, and non-fiction in GQ and The New York Times, and elsewhere. The Times praised his early stories as "dreamlike… grabs hold of both reader and character," and Richard Ford called his ’07 novel, Earthquake I.D., "wonderful… a rich feast." In 2016, J.C. Hallman hailed his latest, MOVIEOLA!, as "a new shriek for a new century." A 2014 selection of criticism, The Sea-God's Herb, was termed "poetic" and "fascinating," in Publishers Weekly. Domini has won an NEA fellowship, taught at Harvard, Northwestern, and elsewhere, and held visiting-artist positions in Italy.

Reviews

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Domini focuses these stories on real emotional crisis moments in his characters' lives. He really gets me inside the characters during the stories. Not only are the stories highly character driven, they practically are the characters, the characters as they are changing at that point in their lives. Gritty, visceral, hard edged, these stories pull me in and greatly satisfy me as a reader.

[Chris Elder · Rating 5 out of 5]

Life on the Edge in Oregon

This is a timely collection of gritty stories about men and women in rural Oregon scraping by in the underbelly of society, people the suburban NPR crowd I count myself part of sees but don’t really know. Good fiction like this is all about inhabiting lives outside our own little worlds.