Jim Nichols is the prize-winning author of the short story collection Slow Monkeys and Other Stories (Carnegie Mellon Press, 2002). His recently completed novel Midcoast has been acquired by Downeast Books of Rockport, Maine for spring of 2011. Another story collection and his work-in-progress, the novel Shapes, will be available in the coming months.

Praise for Slow Monkeys and Other Stories:

Chris Marquis, New York Times Book Review: Nichols makes his characters come alive…Nichols has an unerring ear for dialogue; his characters don't utter a false word…A brilliant… title story.

Melissa Pritchard, in the essay The Near Impossible, written as judge of the Willamette Prize for Fiction: Jim Nichols has shown a rare ability to balance form and formlessness, artifice and rawness, to so lightly tether eros as to showcase, through language, that which is inexpressible, catching wildness within an admirable and precise form. I congratulate him.

Norman Mailer: His dialogue has that fine strain of the just which is always so startling. I think I will go so far as to say that in Jim Nichols we have one more of a rare breed: the born short story writer.

Carolyn Chute: Jim Nichols writes of the struggles, the play, the jokes, the fights, losses and gains, good and bad days, of youth and age, and all mixed together, the family, the friends, the lovers, in a way so vivid and slyly unfolding it’s a magic trick, not a book.

Charles Allen Wyman, The Absinthe Literary Review Slow Monkeys is crammed with distinctly American characters, and with his perfect apprehension and appreciation of human frailty, Jim Nichols comes across as nothing less than the broad authentic voice of America.

David Abrams, January Magazine: Nichols writes with a shaved-down simplicity which is unadorned but certainly never empty. There's always something going on behind each sentence, a slow build of emotion so that, by story's end, you know there's a lot more to these lives than what you see on the page…These stories resonate with the haunting quality of a loon-call drifting across a lake… Slow Monkeys is the kind of book that makes me wish I had the omnipotency of a benevolent God, where with one sweep of my fingers I could convince several hundred thousand readers they must read this collection of gutsy, gritty fiction.

Slow Monkeys and Other Stories
Midcoast, a novel

Willamette Fiction Award; River City Writing Award for Fiction; Maine Arts Commission Independent Artists Award; American Fiction, Vol. 9