Winner of the G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction, selected by Amina Gautier
Eric Hoffer Award finalist
The stories in One of Us explore the tension between groups and individuals, the allure of tribalism, the claustrophobia of belonging, and the alienation that comes with separation. They range from autobiographical to historical and roam temporally and geographically, chronicling, among others, an encounter between the sculptor Louise Nevelson and the anti-Semitic French writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline; a synagogue congregation facing ongoing public scandal; a comedy improv troupe trying to cross the threshold from amateur to professional; and a young man navigating the competing pulls of adventure and domestic bliss at the cusp of the new millennium.
Scott Nadelson grew up in northern New Jersey before escaping to Oregon, where he has lived for the past twenty-four years. He has published four collections of short stories, The Fourth Corner of the World, named a Jewish Fiction Prize Honor Book by the Association of Jewish Libraries; Aftermath; The Cantor’s Daughter; and Saving Stanley: The Brickman Stories; and a memoir, The Next Scott Nadelson: A Life in Progress. His novel Between You and Me was published by Engine Books in 2015. Winner of the Reform Judaism Fiction Prize, the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, and an Oregon Book Award, Scott’s work has appeared in a variety of magazines and literary journals, including Ploughshares, The Southern Review, New England Review, Harvard Review, Glimmer Train, and Crazyhorse, and his work has been cited as distinguished in both the Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays anthologies. He teaches at Willamette University, where he is Hallie Brown Ford Chair in Writing, and in the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA Program at Pacific Lutheran University.
“A carefully curated volume on themes of personal and group identity—inclusion, rejection, escape.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“[Nadelson] is more interested in exposing cracks in the psyche than in fixing them with tidy endings. Although the stories take place in a variety of eras and settings (with about half set in the northern New Jersey suburbs of Nadelson’s youth), there is a thematic strain that runs through most of them, exploring what it means to be inside and outside of a group.”
–Howard Freedman, Jewish News of Northern California
“These stories challenge the ways we identify in terms of nation, race, class and religion and ask readers to consider who really belongs.”
—Amina Gautier
Distributed for BkMk Press.
