We Are Never As Beautiful As We Are Now
At Times both funny and heartbreaking, Adam Gallari’s debut collection, We Are Never as Beautiful as We Are Now, offers a series of nine emotionally rich and incisive stories that follow characters grappling with the unanswerable question “What next?” A sudden encounter conjures a failed relationship. A minor league pitcher, in the twilight of a career that never was, tries to divine his future. A young man accompanies his veteran neighbor and father to a V.F.W. a few years after refusing to attend Annapolis. Stoicism and grit belie the vulnerability of people ultimately searching for someone or something to trust in.
Though his literary forbearers may be Richard Ford and Ernest Hemingway, Adam Gallari re-examines the masculine with a deftness and a grace entirely his own.
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Praise
"These rich, full-hearted stories mark a compelling debut. Adam Gallari is a fearless writer who believes in unobtrusive craft, emotional honesty, most of all in life itself. About the perplexities of that life, he writes thrillingly. His sentences sing with longing and tenderness and regret. "
-- Paul Russell,
The Coming Storm
The Unreal Life of Sergey Vladimirovich Nabokov
"The characters in Adam Gallari's We Are Never As Beautiful As We Are Now each toe some newly reached precipice, past which they too often see only the end of their youth, the decline they believe follows. Gallari excels at showing us the way our dreams first define and then frustrate us, pushing us to quest after glories that all too quickly become only the memories of our glory days, but his stories do not revel in this realization. Rather, they serve to remind us of that which his characters cannot always see: That it is sometimes only we who perceive some end to our own beauty, and perhaps on the other side of it there is something better still, as yet undreamed of but no less desirable than what came before. "
-- Matt Bell, author of How They Were Found
"This young author imbues his work with the love of baseball—and often hits it out of the park."
"These are wonderful stories muscular and intelligent and deeply felt. They explore the shadowed vulnerability of masculinity with grace, wit, and power. Gallari s voice is original and affecting, an absolute pleasure to read."
-- Bret Anthony Johnston
"What we have in this book is not an epiphany that all four hooves of a horse are off the ground at once, but a sense of fracture, an inability to come to terms with time and being passed by. We know there is no remedy."
"A promising newcomer…Gallari's tales are earnestly conceived and tenderly wrought."
-- Publishers Weekly
About the Author
Adam Gallari (b. 1984)
is an American ex-pat currently working on a novel and pursuing a PhD at the University of Exeter. Originally from New York, he holds an MFA from the University of California, Riverside, and his essays and fiction have appeared in or are forthcoming from numerous outlets, including The Quarterly Conversation, Fifth Wednesday Journal, therumpus.net, TheMillions.com, anderbo.com and The MacGuffin. We Are Never As Beautiful As We Are Now is his first book.
