The Deer Walking Upside Down: Stories — Jerry Mcgahan

Finalist:
2015 Foreword Reviews INDIEFAB Awards, Short Story
2016 High Plains Book Awards, Short Stories


In this debut short story collection from Jerry McGahan, nature in all its fascinating, perplexing, and maddening varieties intercedes with the complex yearnings, courtings, departings, and returnings of the human characters who inhabit the fringes of wilderness in contemporary Montana. Comprised of short fiction selected over a 20-year period, The Deer Walking Upside Down invites readers into a world where hard work and an abiding respect for all things wild inform the lives of this rural paradise, yet not without a price. As men and women reconcile passion and inclination, love and the wreckage of aging, there is always work to be done: fences to be repaired, hives to be tended to, livestock to be fed, and loves to be fostered. Steeped in the tradition of Jim Harrison and Tom McGuane, this collection marks the arrival of a distinct voice in the contemporary Western literary landscape.