Welcome to one of the January 31st stops on the blog tour for The Benefits of Breathing by Christopher Meeks, organized by Blackthorn Book Tours. Look for others participating in this tour to read reviews of this title!
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About the Book
The Benefits of Breathing
by Christopher Meeks
Published 23 May 2020
by White Whisker Books
Genre: Short Fiction, Literary
Page Count: 199
Add it to your Goodreads TBR!
As Roderick Clark says in the Foreword, “It’s all about love, isn’t it?”
In The Benefits of Breathing, Christopher Meeks’s third collection of short stories, Meeks dives again into the human condition, particularly within relationships. As one reader wrote on Amazon, “Some authors need a lot of words to describe their worlds and their people. Christopher Meeks says a lot with a little.”
The Los Angeles Times has called his stories “poignant and wise.”
In this volume, “A Dog Story” captures a crumbled marriage and the love of a dog named Scrappy. “Joni Paredes” shows the birth of a new relationship that starts at a daughter’s wedding. “Nestor by the Numbers” follows one man’s often hilarious online dating experiences after he finally accepts his wife is gone. “Jerry with a Twist” shows an actor on an audition while his pregnant girlfriend helps him through a crisis. These and seven other stories will bring you into the special world of Meeks.
As reviewer Grady Harp notes, if you’ve previously “discovered the idiosyncrasies of Meeks’s writing style and content, rest assured that this new collection not only will not disappoint, but also it will provide further proof that we have a superior writer of the genre in our presence.”
“If you like Raymond Carver,” said author David Scott Milton, “you’ll love Meeks.”
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About the Author
Christopher Meeks first published short fiction in a number of literary journals, and the stories are available in award-winning collections, The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea and Months and Seasons. This third collection, The Benefits of Breathing, was published this year.
In between writing short stories, he’s focused on novels. The Brightest Moon of the Century centers on a man who yearns for love and success, covering over thirty years—a tale that Marc Schuster of Small Press Reviews describes as “a great and truly humane novel in the tradition of Charles Dickens and John Irving.” His next novel, Love at Absolute Zero, focuses on a physicist who uses the tools of science to find his soul mate–and he has just three days to do it. Blood Drama has Meeks edge into a thriller. Most recently, A Death in Vegas is a mystery. Now he’s joined Army veteran Samuel Gonzalez, Jr., for a visceral tour of Iraq with the men and women on the front lines in Baqubah in The Chords of War. It’s about a musician, kicked out of his own band, joining the Army for discipline. He plunges into the horrors of combat. He tries to hold on with his music.
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