Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
Winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize for Fiction selected by Ed Park
A novel described as Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson meets Child of God by Cormac McCarthy Lore by Roy Kesey is a searing novel about loneliness, grief, and mercy
Lore is a 76-year-old widow in rural Maryland who has chosen to seclude herself as a way to cope with her guilt and hide from a painful past. However as the pandemic intensifies her mind and body begins to fail, she begins to long for living beyond the confines of her mind and her home. What ensues is a deeply interior novel as Lore begins to reflect on her life, her marriage and his passing, home and the land where it resides, her neighbors, her husbands books which serve as both ritual and memorial, and her host of many animals including 10 parrots, a dog on wheels, and a cat we rarely see.
Kesey’s newest novel follows along the tradition set by Claire Keegan and Denis Johnson. It has the sensitivity, interiority, and finds sacred value in the ordinary like a Marilyn Robinson novel and a sense of existential isolation in the tradition of Cormac McCarthy. Lore is a testament on the beauty of daily living and all that seems mundane. It’s a poignant contemplation of life, regret, hope, and community and begs the question: in a world undone, is our best hope for survival actually each other?
PRAISE FOR LORE
“I love this book and its grandiose title because it makes mythic an otherwise anonymous woman, someone maybe you’ve seen—older, alone—as she navigates financial hardships and small pleasures during a time when the pandemic has enforced her isolation. It turns an ordinary woman extraordinary. If she can make it through, maybe we all can. …You’ll emerge more attentive to the world—its weathers (“she watches the wheat tremble”) and its stripmalls (“more podiatrists than a town this size should need”) and, yes, its hingelike edible geese—and to some of the people in it.” –Ed Park, author of Same Bed Different Dreams
“A beautifully distilled and deeply hypnotic novel. Kesey writes brilliantly about the joys and dangers of isolation and the slow, hard work of coming out into the world again.” –Jenny Offill, author of Weather
“The entirety of human experience distilled to a wild, concentrated hit of heartbreaking, curmudgeonly, parrot-obsessed beauty. I love a book that feels like an emotional rocket ride, and this one goes high and far and very, very fast.” –Ben Loory, author of Tales of Falling and Flying
"What a strange, lonely, beautiful novel - dripping with sensation, of tactile living and hard reality melding with the kind of sliding memories that make the protagonist, Lore, so aptly named. And it's full of parrots!” –Amber Sparks, author of Happy People Don't Live Here
PRAISE FOR ROY KESEY
“Perfect, masterful portraits of an international cross-section of wise, broken souls—hopeful, brutal, funny as hell, and heart-crushing, every last one.” –Elizabeth Crane, author of We Only Know So Much
“Roy Kesey is one of my favorite contemporary writers, and Any Deadly Thing is another triumph. These stories, reminiscent of William Gass in the remarkable way they combine a virtuoso playfulness and wit with an atmosphere of grimness and grief and heartbreak, range the world over for their brilliantly realized locales, but they share a deeper setting in what Gass calls 'the only holiness we have, ' human consciousness. Kesey demonstrates once again that he is a spectacularly deft and empathetic priest of that creed, which is the only one for me.” –Michael Griffith, author of Trophy
“With his engaging narrative voice and well-paced prose, Kesey dramatizes moments of extremity through characters who struggle to reconcile their burden of guilt and the impulse to do something that helps. (...) This pattern of revelation during debasement is part of the glorious nature of Kesey's misfits in misery in Any Deadly Thing. Wrong about so much in their lives, their moments of clarity, companionship, and agency stand out all the brighter amid the dirt and doubt.” –Jason Marc Harris, Mid-American Review
"Every one of the characters is someone the reader can latch on to. Their choices are terrible, but they make sense. It's not something you would do (you hope), but it's something you can't look away from, like the tastiest, pathos-iest train wreck you've ever seen." –Mike Tager, Jmww Journal
"Kesey's writing is elegant and detailed in Any Deadly Thing, anchoring story lines that are at times surreal. (...) He knows the mood he's setting, knows how to guide the reader through these stories and knows just when to step away when they are over." –Steve Newman, Time Out Chicago
Roy Kesey was born in a truck on Highway 99 and has lived half his life outside of the U.S. His publications include a novel, a novella, two short story collections, and a historical guidebook. He is the translator of two Pola Oloixarac novels: Savage Theories and Dark Constellations. He won an NEA grant for fiction and a PEN/Heim grant for translation. His stories, essays, poems, and translations have appeared in over a hundred magazines and anthologies, including Best American Short Stories and the Norton anthologies New Sudden Fiction: Short-Short Stories from America and Beyond and New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction. His most recent collection, Lore (Sarabande, 2027) was selected by Ed Park to win the 2025 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. He lives on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.