Thrift Store Jackets

Thrift Store Jackets is a collection of nine disparate short stories written during the last year and a half. These stories examine trauma in its various forms, whether it's losing your best second-hand jacket to a nefarious postal delivery cabal, having your idea for a novel misappropriated by a rogue Artificial Intelligence program packing a savage literary bent, or just getting your ass kicked by a sentient house plant. Thrift Store Jackets signs a penlight down the dark, mammoth corridors of the human psyche. Karl Koweski is a displaced Region Rat now living in rural Alabama. He writes when his pen allows it. He's a husband to a lovely wife and father to some fantastic kids. He collects pop culture ephemera. On most days he prefers Flash Gordon to Luke Skywalker and Neil Diamond to Elvis Presley. "I've been a fan of Karl Koweski's writing since first publishing him in The Brown Bottle, a zine I threw together at the turn of the century, back when...well, back when Karl and I were young. And it thrills me to say that I still love his work, even as Karl and I both hobble through middle age. Koweski's characters in Thrift Store Jackets are not great people, and they're certainly not heroes. But they're real people: the real people that all of us know, the real people plodding through their tedious days with dreams that should matter, but most often their dreams are ignored. They're not rich or pretty or refined, but they're the people sitting next to you right now-funny and sad and ugly and strangely gorgeous. If you blink, you'll miss them. Thankfully, Koweski doesn't. That's why I'll always be a fan of Karl Koweski's work."-Nathan Graziano, Born on Good Friday