The Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award longlist
The world of Tell Everyone I Said Hi is geographically small but far from provincial in its portrayal of emotionally complicated lives. With all the heartbreaking earnestness of a Wilco song, these eighteen stories by Chad Simpson roam the small-town playgrounds, blue-collar neighborhoods, and rural highways of Illinois, Indiana, and Kentucky to find people who鈥檝e lost someone or something they love and have not yet found ways to move forward.
Simpson鈥檚 remarkable voice masterfully moves between male and female and adolescent and adult characters. He embraces their helplessness and shares their sad, strange, and sometimes creepy slices of life with grace, humor, and mounds of empathy. In 鈥淧eloma,鈥 a steelworker grapples with his preteen daughter鈥檚 feeble suicide attempts while the aftermath of his wife鈥檚 death and the politics of factory life vie to hem him in. The narrator of 鈥淔ostering鈥 struggles to determine the ramifications of his foster child鈥檚 past now that he and his wife are expecting their first biological child. In just two pages, 鈥淟et x鈥 negotiates the yearnings and regrets of childhood through mathematical variables and the summertime interactions of two fifth-graders.
Poignant, fresh, and convincing, these are stories of women who smell of hairspray and beer and of landscapers who worry about their livers, of flooded basements and loud trucks, of bad exes and horrible jobs, of people who remain loyal to sports teams that always lose. Displaced by circumstances both in and out of their control, the characters who populate Tell Everyone I Said Hi are lost in their own surroundings, thwarted by misguided aspirations and long-buried disappointments, but fully open to the possibility that they will again find their way.
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鈥淐had Simpson writes with a piercing tenderness and sadness about loss and helplessness and the impossible decisions that we face every day, and the complexity of the compromises we offer the world, and ourselves, in response."鈥擩im Shepard
"Chad Simpson is clever, compassionate, and refreshingly nuanced in his perceptions of the world, and his stories enchant with both style and substance. Tell Everyone I Said Hi returns again and again to fractured families, to orphans and widows, the strange and the estranged, and each story offers new insight into loneliness and love. Each story is a delight."鈥擩ustin Torres, author, We the Animals
"Chad Simpson鈥檚 Tell Everyone I Said Hi is my kind of book. James Wright once beautifully asked, Where is the sea that once solved the whole/ loneliness of the Midwest? The line kept bubbling up in my mind as I read these unpretentious and deeply moving stories. We鈥檙e in the Midwest鈥擟had Simpson鈥檚 Midwest鈥攁 place of broken hearts and missed opportunities, flooded basements and faulty wiring. The real stuff, it鈥檚 all here."鈥擯eter Orner, author of Love and Shame and Love
