John Brandon has been awarded the Grisham Fellowship at Ole Miss, the Tickner Fellowship at Gilman School in Baltimore, and has received a Sustainable Arts Foundation
Fellowship. He was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. His short fiction has appeared in
ESPN The Magazine,
Oxford American,
McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern,
Mississippi Review,
Subtropics,
Chattahoochee Review,
Hotel Amerika, and many other publications, and he has written about college football for
GQ online and
Grantland. He was born in Florida and now resides in Minnesota, where he teaches at Hamline University in St. Paul.
Brandon's new book is
Penalties of June.
At Electric Lit he tagged nine books that give "a dizzying tour of divergent Florida experiences and styles whose kinship, if they share any, is tied up in heat and crime and displacement and unpredictability." One title on the list:
Everyday Psycho Killers: A History for Girls by Lucy Corin
This is a novel, but if it didn’t say that on the cover, you’d think it was an odd sort of memoir. Sometimes it’s an essay. Occasionally, a treatise on speculative 
neuroscience. You have to earn your readerly footing. At the beginning, the book hides its narrator—there’s a 1st person voice, but we don’t know who it’s attached to; a girl is spoken about in the 3rd person, and then we realize that girl is the 1st person narrator, a first-person narrator that imagines other people’s lives so fully that those characters sometimes get POV. Many of the described events (especially toward the beginning of the book) feel deliciously theoretical, and the timeline is mostly in order but that order feels incidental and unimportant. Amazingly, the narrative gymnastics never outstrip Corin’s intellectual agility, her uncanny talent for turning a seeming tangent into exactly the relevant passage you didn’t know you needed. The world of the novel feels both real and unreal, perhaps due to the larding of mythical and fairytale and historical references—Repunzel and Cinderella and the Venus de Milo; griffins and Egyptian gods and Joan of Arc; Anne Boleyn and the Grimm tales and eventually, yes, Leonard Lake and Jeffrey Dahmer and Danny Rolling. It’s Hollywood, Florida some thirty-five or forty years ago, described with familiar details—orange groves, last-gasp strip malls, white-out-sniffing—but also it’s Corin’s unique creation.
Read about
the other entries on the list at Electric Lit.
--Marshal Zeringue
Fellowship. He was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. His short fiction has appeared in ESPN The Magazine, Oxford American, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Mississippi Review, Subtropics, Chattahoochee Review, Hotel Amerika, and many other publications, and he has written about college football for GQ online and Grantland. He was born in Florida and now resides in Minnesota, where he teaches at Hamline University in St. Paul.
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