Introducing Sylvan Caravan

And a New Chapter for Past Present Editions

We’re beyond excited to announce that Sylvan Caravan by Charlie Sutherland is set to be the first book published under Present Editions, our original content imprint, and the first title in our catalog that is both contemporary and entirely original. We chose this book and this author to publish because we believe they both belong in the same company as the other titles that started this imprint, including We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, and Passing by Nella Larsen.

Sylvan Caravan is a collection of thirteen short stories set in the working-class towns and burned-over valleys of Western Pennsylvania—Eldersville, Avella, Imperial, the long roads between them—among people whose interior lives are vastly larger than the circumstances that contain them. A foundling girl raised by an old man with a bum heart who finds herself at thirty still waiting for something she can't name. A bartender working the closing shift alone, mopping up after regulars who remind him of someone he's lost. A man and a woman parked by the Ohio River, watching the sections of water flicker between the yellow cars of a passing freight train, hands resting on a center console, everything unresolved between them.

Sutherland writes in the vernacular of the people he writes about—their rhythms, their humor, their capacity for sudden violence and equally sudden tenderness—without a trace of condescension or distance, without the self-congratulatory poverty tourism that mars so much contemporary American fiction set in working-class places. Sutherland grew up in this world. He knows how it sounds, how it moves, what people say when they're trying to say something else entirely. His sentences are built for the long haul, deceptively simple on the surface, but always exploring the complications of human moralily underneath. He can write a man holding out half an egg sandwich to a woman who is twirling her hair and biting her lip and make you feel the entire weight of what isn't being said between them. He can write violence that arrives from someone you love and make you understand, without excusing it, exactly how it got there.

You can feel the presiding literary influences throughout the book—Raymond Carver, Denis Johnson, early Cormac McCarthy, and Flannery O'Connor—without them inserting themselves. Sutherland has his own voice, which is warmer than Carver's, funnier than McCarthy's, less interested in grace than O'Connor, and more interested in the specific texture of contemporary American working-class life than any of them. He is not imitating a tradition. He is working within one, and extending it.

The natural world runs through every story in Sylvan Caravan, like a current—forests, rivers, hills, fire, the particular quality of light in Western Pennsylvania at dusk in January when it's too warm for the season and something feels wrong. This is not pastoral fiction. The wilderness in these stories is not a bit player. It is indifferent and sometimes threatening and always present, pressing in on the edges of every scene.

Sylvan Caravan is scheduled for publication in August of this year. If you’re as excited as we are to read it, please send me an email today and we’ll get you on the presale list.

Stay tuned for more info about the book in the coming weeks, including details about a launch signing event we are planning in New York!