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Jane Bradley’s story collection Are We Lucky Yet? Was a Runner Up in the AWP Grace Paley Short Fiction Competition with a rave review from the judge Allan Gurganus that notes: Comedy alongside heartache, these stories croon honky-tonk ballads after closing-time. They wade in loss but keep scanning for a Coast Guard rescue copter. Astute about the nuances of sliding social class, the stories are tough, direct, grimly funny. We witness a parked-truck sexual encounter between one |
slumming middle-aged female professor and her date, a burly passive-aggressive building-contractor. The power dynamic leading toward sex is played out like an analysis of strategies leading to the Battle of Vicksburg. Every move, feint, pretension, flanking action tallies like some last-quarter game-score. The writing is adult: it acknowledges how much has been lost already. But the tone remains fresh with sweet (or bruising) sensation. Every character comes rigged with a crazed belief—as the title suggests—-that Luck is still somehow bound this way—after an unexpected delay in another time-zone.
The tales are set in trailer suburbia. But their actions seem played out across the Wal-Mart parking lot’s only clover-covered median. Sexual relief can be found, but out near the dumpsters of a closed strip-mall steak house. The writer’s steadying empathy and talent for doom, drive the characters toward reckless chance-takings. This creates a tender suspense as hard to shake the stories’ betraying faith in Luck itself.The story collection is coming out this fall from Press 53. Bradley has also have placed her novel, You Believers, with the prestigious Inkwell Management Agency.
Her screenwriting text Screenwriting 101: Small Steps While Thinking Big came out from Kendall Hunt this summer. It is being picked up by professors at Columbia College in Chicago and at Cleveland State.
In addition her essay “Ain’t Nowhere to Go From Here” appeared in an international anthology of non-fiction, The Truth About the Fact; she gave a reading of the essay at the Levine-Greenberg Agency in Manhattan. Her story, “The Amish Man” came out in Cimarron; a story “You Believers” ( novel excerpt) came out in MOTA: Addiction; and another story, “A Long Way From Derbyshire” came out in an anthology, XX Eccentric Women.