American Buffalo Books launches its third title on September 17, Adam Galanski-De León’s debut novel, Szarotka.
Szarotka
As a boy, Spider’s life changes forever when he is sexually assaulted by three high school girls during a family trip to the Jersey Shore. Since then, Spider has navigated the peaks and valleys of his life while carrying the weight of his past trauma—alone, always alone.
In his hometown Chicago, Spider brawls with Detroit Lions fans and smokes darts with the homeless, has messy hookups on rooftops and drives in fast cars with Tommy Northside. Throughout, Spider stumbles closer and closer to the edge. When he finally seems to find love, he pushes it away.
After the end of his marriage, Spider surrenders to a dead-end factory job, where he reflects on the strange and violent images that haunt his dreams and waking memories. His mother, a Polish immigrant, is the only person who can still see the potential he can’t seem to actualize. To her, he remains a szarotka, a beautiful mountain flower.
Playing with the dream-like montage of human memory, Adam J. Galanski-De León’s debut novel explores how the past, present, and future bleed together to form the self. Through the second-person mosaic of Spider’s personal history, Szarotka searches for meaning in the darkest moments of our lives.
“Adam J. Galanski-De León’s Szarotka has carved a deep and permanent space in my imagination. From the terrifying mysteries of childhood to the booze-fueled wreckage of bad jobs and ruined love, Galanski-De León packs this novel with a sweeping range of the human experience that is unified by both a gritty vision and lyrically resonant tenderness. The result is achingly unforgettable, hands-down the most vibrant work of fiction I’ve read in years. This book has an entire galaxy of wise things to tell us, so we better listen up.”
— Patrick Michael Finn, author of A Place for Snakes to Breed
“Szarotka is a harrowing coming of age story that pushes against the crumbling factories and dim-lit bars of South Side Chicago. With the last of its strength, the South Side pushes back—through a vivid, unforgettable cast of scarred survivors who alternately serve as pathfinders or obstacles in one boy’s heartsick journey to adulthood. This is a remarkable portrayal of the damaged generation left to fight for their lives in the receding shadows of a once-vibrant migrant community. More directly, it is a powerful portrait of a fatherless youth finding within himself the courage, the perseverence and the navigation skills to survive in a rapidly-changing world.”
— Frank Haberle, author of Downlanders
“Despairing, electric, transcendent, true.”
— Emma Smith-Stevens, author of The Australian
Adam J. Galanski-De León is a writer from Chicago. Szarotka, his first novel, is the winner of the 2022 American Buffalo Books Fiction Prize. He is the author of a novella, The Magpie Funeral, and his work has appeared in Jimson Weed, Soundings East, Penumbra, and other journals. He lives with his wife and four cats in an apartment full of vinyl, books, odd trinkets, and vintage taxidermy. Adam maintains a website at http://www.adamjgalanskideleon.com
Unequal Temperament
Unequal Temperament
From her early aspirations of being an accomplished pianist to her current job as a meteorologist, Morgan has found that life—much like forecasting weather patterns and tuning harpsichords—is far from an exact science. When her father, the famed painter Jon Tallis, dies unexpectedly, Morgan pushes away her husband, Rob, and the growing chasm threatens their marriage. Can Morgan find solace as an accompanist for the opera Peter Grimes? And if not in the opera, can it be found in the leading man, Ford?
With operatic flourishes, Cheryl Walsh’s debut novel explores themes of isolation, trauma, infidelity, and the subtle ways parents alter the trajectory of their children’s lives.
Through the lens of art, music, and meteorology, Unequal Temperament examines how we navigate the storms of our lives. Will Morgan and Rob find their way home? And what is home anyway?
“Sharply observed, built of masterful prose, Unequal Temperament affirms the vitality of art in our lives at a time when devotion to craft and the pursuit of the sublime are made out to be old-fashioned terms. This is a book as awed by a great piece of music as it is by the shadings and complications of its very rich characters. Like the great Paula Fox, Walsh knows how to make a tight frame give us a very wide view of the world.”
— Brian Castleberry, author of Nine Shiny Objects
“Perhaps the greatest compliment I can give Cheryl Walsh’s Unequal Temperment is that I learned so much from it. I learned about harpsichord tuning and Baroque music. I learned about opera and painting and weather systems. I learned about grief and the ways it bends and twists the grieving into something—someone—new. Walsh writes with such beauty and clarity that it’s impossible not to get swept up in the voices of her trio of narrators. I simply did not want this book to end.”
— Meghan Phillips, author of Abstinence Only
Cheryl Walsh earned a master’s degree in English history before giving in to the tug of fabrication and turning her hand to fiction writing. She has been awarded writing residencies with the Djerassi Resident Artists Program and Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts, and her stories have appeared in online literary journals as well as print magazines and anthologies. A native Michigander, she traded in lake-effect snow squalls for prairie blizzards and now lives and writes in Iowa City, where she shares a hundred-year-old house with her husband. This is her debut novel.
Year
of the Buffalo
To purchase: commerce.cashnet.com/KSUENGL
Year of the Buffalo
Ernie and his brother, Scott, have never seen eye-to-eye—literally or figuratively. Scott’s a mountain of a man; Ernie’s a meek computer analyst with a shambles of a marriage, who never, ever answers the phone when his brother calls.
That all changes when Scott is introduced as the face of Go West!, a video game featuring his old wrestling persona, Mr. Bison. Now among the nouveau riche, Scott invites Ernie to come live with him and his pregnant wife, Holly, a teacher and aspiring diarist, on their new farm—complete with a living, breathing buffalo, Billy.
When the video-game producers call on Scott to help sell Go West!, Holly orchestrates an American road trip that sends the brothers eastward and into the less-traveled depths of their hearts and memories. What ensues is an episodic tale that examines themes of grief, sibling rivalry, ambition, and the repercussions of toxic masculinity as it follows the Isaacson brothers’ fumbling attempts to reestablish their childhood relationship—or what they wish that relationship had been.
In perfect tune with the complexities of modern communication and with a wry sense of humor, Aaron Burch’s epic debut novel, Year of the Buffalo, explores our stories—the ones we tell ourselves, the ones we tell each other, and the ones we might never tell at all.
“Year of the Buffalo is a brilliant testimony to how good Aaron Burch is, a perfect realization of what makes his writing so special. It manages that balance of tenderness and violence, finding beauty in the most unexpected places. At the heart of the novel, Burch looks closely at the nature of time, the way it pulls us backwards, then strands us in a present that we can’t quite understand, and then makes us a little afraid to imagine what kind of future awaits. But Burch knows how to control time, to make it tell the kind of story that matters, and this is a novel that, no lie, makes you want to be alive.” — Kevin Wilson, author of Nothing to See Here
“From his nonchalantly spectacular premise (involving estranged brothers, grief, professional wrestling, a video game, and a buffalo!), Aaron Burch launches a poignant, past-haunted journey novel that takes the Isaacson boys both farther from and closer to an idea of home. On the road, punches are thrown and taken, masks are ditched and donned, and stories are swapped and stitched together. This is a novel of substance by a large-hearted writer, and it’s an auspicious start for American Buffalo Books.” — Chris Bachelder, author of The Throwback Special
“In Year of the Buffalo, Aaron Burch brings his considerable talents to bear in subtle and heart-stringing scenes that tell the kind of story that lingers long after last call, of the catch and release of late-night nostalgia and the love and distance between brothers.” — Amelia Gray, author of Gutshot
“Two brothers in a too-fancy rented SUV, driving towards Michigan and away from, what? Their past? Their avatars and alter egos? Their pet bison? All of the above? Year of the Buffalo by Aaron Burch is a poignant, searching tale of brotherhood and the personas we employ, both within the ring and without. It’s a book about memory and the past refreshingly devoid of easy nostalgia. It’s a book for anyone who’d pick Talking Heads as their walk-up song. It’s a book you should read.” — Danny Caine, author of How to Resist Amazon and Why
“Year of the Buffalo excavates the complexity of sibling relationships among grown-up people with such a light hand— depths are probed, but told with an inviting immediacy; I felt myself leaning gladly into all these characters as they unpeeled and revealed on their roadtrip, metaphorical and real.” — Aimee Bender, author of The Butterfly Lampshade
Aaron Burch grew up in Tacoma, WA. He is the author of the memoir/literary analysis Stephen King’s The Body; a short story collection, Backswing; and a novella, How to Predict the Weather. He is the founding editor of Hobart and, more recently, its offshoot journals, HAD and WAS. He lives in Ann Arbor, MI. This is his first novel.
American Buffalo Books is a non-profit press affiliated with the English Department at Kansas State University, founded by Daniel A. Hoyt in 2021 to give K-State students hands-on publishing experience. Students edit and promote our books, they select the annual Buffalo Books Fiction Prize, and they take part in all press endeavors. (Tucker Newsome — a former M.A. student — took the above photo, and Kansas State art students design our covers.) We publish novels that explore the Midwest, the Plains, and so-called “flyover” portions of the West. We open for submissions just once a year, usually for the month of February, and we publish one book per year (the winner of our book prize). Our forthcoming books are Unequal Temperament (2023) by Cheryl Walsh, Szarotka (2024) by Adam Galanski-De León, and Prairie Fire (2025) by Ben Nadler.
Contact: BuffaloBooks (at) ksu.edu or DanHoyt (at) ksu.edu
Submissions: https://buffalobooks.submittable.com/submit
American Buffalo Books 