Publishers Marketplace: Jim Nichols

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 is available for consideration by agents and/or editors. Another story collection and his work-in-progress, the novel Shapes, will also be available in the coming months.

Midcoast is the story of Troy Hull, a young man who after the death of his parents leaves college to return to his family’s traditional fishing life in mid-coast Maine. After a few good years, Troy finds himself faced with the loss of that life, along with his fifth-generation family home, because of poor fishing and the changing nature of the area. As a former high school classmate turned banker tells Troy, in the midst of prompting him to sell: “This isn’t a fisherman’s town any more.” Indeed, soaring property values have made mid-coast Maine increasingly a haven for land speculators, wealthy summer residents and tax-sheltered retirees, and Troy’s home -- just off Pequot Harbor on a long, private stretch of Hull Creek -- is exactly the sort of property these newcomers desire.

Another of Troy’s former classmates, also a fisherman, has found his own shady methods for dealing with the situation, and as spring blooms along the coast, detailing just how much there is to lose, Troy must decide whether to follow his pal's risky, crooked path to solvency, or let the straight-and-narrow take him from his beloved home forever. (He tests this temptation with a small-time smuggling trip that nearly costs him dearly.)

Midcoast is as much a story of action and relationships as it is one of economics. Throw in a run-away wife, a new home-grown love interest, a wicked city woman ("Why don't you just fuck me now and get it over with?" she tells Troy on his boat), waterfront characters, a wild pre-denoument where Troy and his gang throw a big-shot TV host into the chilly harbor, a drug deal gone bad that leads to Troy’s ultimate, bittersweet decision -- all told in prose that has drawn praise from the likes of Norman Mailer, Melissa Pritchard and the New York Times Book Review -- and you have a story regional in its picturesque setting, but universal in its new telling of the old struggle between right and wwrong.

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.