Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, this daring collection of nine stories introduces readers to an edgy vision and a world in which certainties are tested and found wanting. A Cambodian refugee negotiates the icy waters of American social and sexual life. A young couple seeks peak experiences” to escape grief, only to discover that they’ve brought it along with them. A teenage girl, unable to face the imminent end of her grandfather’s life, risks her own life in an impulsive act. A man’s fragile hold on reality becomes the key to his finding, albeit through a terrifying labyrinth, his heart’s desire. The characters in Bliss and Other Short Stories must find their way to a truth that, though less than perfect, is one they can live with. Finding bliss, it seems, is as much about pain as about pleasure, and in Ted Gilley’s writing the discovery is always exquisite.

Ted Gilley is a native of southwestern Virginia but has lived in New England for most of his life. An editor and proofreader by profession, he has worked variously as librarian, commercial fisherman, actor, writer, housekeeper and cook. His short stories and poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, Electrum, Northwest Review, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, the National Review, Free Verse, New England Review and other magazines and journals as well as the anthologies October Mountain and Potlatch. A graduate of San Diego State College, Gilley was awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts/Vermont Arts Council and the McCullough Library in 2007. In 2008, he won the Alehouse Press (San Francisco) national poetry competition.