Status Updates From Hundred Proof: Stories

No way am I going to be finished with this anthology by the end of the year.
I’ll still be reading these stories as we enter the New Year. But I have to start a Nelson Algren novel I 1st read in junior high school.

Taking this anthology slow.
These interconnected stories are first-person narratives, each voiced by a character calling himself John.
They’re hardboiled tales involving bad cops, ex-cons, guys on the run, guys violating terms of their paroles, working “straight” gigs as loggers in Upstate New York.
Violence dogs them like a bad cough they can’t shake.
Amazing writer - a modern Steinbeck or Hemingway.

Don’t get why the author -Scott Wolven- isn’t being raved about across the reading universe.

Short stories of beautiful-losers, sentimentally unsentimental about real men and women, bent but square shooters, weathering quiet emotional breakdowns and tests of their soul’s resilience.

Criminals and ex-cons working blue collar gigs attempting to go straight.
As great as Wolven’s first collection of stories.