On Sale Now: Where the Money Went

Kevin Canty is a master of the short story whose work has been compared to that of Flannery O’Connor and Raymond Carver. In Where the Money Went, a collection The Miami Herald calls, “incisive, bracingly insightful,” Cantry surprises us with stories about love and the desertion of love, all written from a man’s point of view.

The review continues, “Canty has great compassion for his sometimes-deluded, always-confused men: the college boy still reeling from having almost killed his brother; the married drinker who realizes that his new sobriety demands a big change in his life; the father who realizes he can’t protect his 4-year-old son, ‘a biter,’ from the disapproval of the world. Like us, they squander their good fortune foolishly, on boats and houses and affairs and more booze than is good for them, on lovers who will leave and others who will be abandoned.

“Canty’s uncanny ability to elevate the everyday sets these stories apart. He deftly re-evaluates dreams of success, makes drama and sense of modern emotional calamity. As he cooks for his married friends whose lives are on the verge of collapsing, Andrew in ‘Sleeping Beauty’ has ‘made right choices and wrong ones but they have worked out and if his life is not at all as he had imagined it, if his life is short of what he had hoped for, it is at least all right and better than most.’ Canty generously allows us to see that there is beauty in contentment.”

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