Phil Condon | Nine Ten Again

Published: September 29, 2009

You feel an almost uncomfortable intimacy with the indelibly drawn characters in Phil Condon’s new collection of short stories:  

The Vietnam vet, plagued by flashbacks, who eats a yellow ribbon left on his mailbox, bite by slow bite, in “A Country Voice.”

The desperate, angry truck driver in the title story, who feels “his old grudge hard and sharp, working back to the surface like a splinter.”

And the successful, Porsche-driving suburbanite in “The White Beast,” who finds an opossum in his house – an encounter that leaves him with “this lonely feeling inside, small and wild, loose and afraid.”

Nine Ten Again won the Elixir Press 2008 Fiction Award. The contest’s judge, RT Smith, says the collection’s 10 stories “feature an unflinching realism but still manage to unfold surprisingly and eloquently.”

Condon is the author of two previously published books of fiction: Clay Center and River Street, and Montana Surround, a collection of essays. He teaches environmental writing and literature at The University of Montana.

– Kristi Niemeyer