Margins
Dysphoria book cover
Dysphoria
an Appalachian gothic
2019
First Published
3.70
Average Rating
164
Number of Pages
What can you save with a Mason jar? Money? A life? When Paul heads back to Red Knife, Kentucky for his father's funeral, his visit turns into an extended stay and a search for the people and places that made his dad so dysphoric about life. What he finds is years of tumult and abuse and shame, all centered on one day, long ago, and an accident at an abandoned mine tipple. The hauntings of the past become all too real for Paul, and, as he comes to grips with his father's death, his own life is endangered... A new Appalachian gothic from Sheldon Lee Compton, the man Donald Ray Pollock has called "a hillbilly Bukowski, one of the grittiest writers to come down the pike since Larry Brown."
Avg Rating
3.70
Number of Ratings
43
5 STARS
37%
4 STARS
16%
3 STARS
30%
2 STARS
12%
1 STARS
5%
goodreads

Author

Sheldon Compton
Sheldon Compton
Author · 5 books

Sheldon Lee Compton is a short story writer, poet, novelist, and memoirist from Pike County, Kentucky. He is the author of the short story collections The Same Terrible Storm (Foxhead Books, 2012), Where Alligators Sleep (Foxhead Books, 2014), Absolute Invention (Secret History Books, 2019) and Sway (Cowboy Jamboree Press, 2020). Compton is also the author of the novels Brown Bottle (Bottom Dog Press, 2016), Alice and the Wendigo (Secret History Books, 2017), and Dysphoria (Cowboy Jamboree Press, 2019). His poetry chapbook Podunk Lore, was part of the Lantern Lit series (Dog On a Chain Press, 2018) and his first full-length poetry collection Runaways was published 2021 by Alien Buddha Press. In 2021 Cowboy Jamboree Press published The Collected Stories of Sheldon Lee Compton. On the anniversary of Breece D'J Pancake Cowboy Jamboree Press published his memoir The Orchard Is Full of Sound: One author's connection with Breece D'J Pancake. In 2012, he was a finalist for both the Gertrude Stein Fiction Award and the Still Fiction Award. His writing has been nominated for the Chaffin Award for Excellence in Appalachian Writing, the Pushcart Prize, and was twice longlisted for Wigleaf's Top 50 in 2015 and 2019. He was cited twice for Best Small Fictions, in 2015 and 2016, before having his short story "Aversion" included in Best Small Fictions 2019. Aside from his primary writing, he is the founder and editor of the literary journal Revolution John and the founder and curator of the interview project Chaos Questions: Strange Interviews with Amazing People.

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