• Moral Tale and Other Moral Tales, A
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Moral Tale and Other Moral Tales, A

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Provocative, funny, and precisely observed, this debut collection examines the way we view sex, the environment, friendship, aging, love and honesty
  • 18 April 2017
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A Moral Tale, and Other Moral Tales presents a twist on the classic morality play, where rewards and punishments betray the classic fairytale logic and the greatest redemption is "to thine own self be true." 

A deluded mathematician spends the night with a recent divorcee who realizes his story doesn't add up. A cat-fearing woman leaves her husband and lands somewhere between home and the underworld. A cheating husband decides to kill his wife and falls disastrously in love with her instead. Colored by an unpredictable and entertaining cast, the stories in this collection explore everything from sublimated desire and apocalyptic despair to classical romance, thwarted idealism, and criminal passion.

Winner of the 2016 Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Contest, A Moral Tale, and Other Moral Tales is the debut short story collection by Josh Emmons, whose past novels have been praised by The New York Times, People Magazine, and Jonathan Franzen.

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Price: $16.95
Pages: 184
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Imprint: Dzanc Books
Publication Date: 18 April 2017
Trim Size: 8.50 X 5.50 in
ISBN: 9781941088807
Format: Paperback
BISACs: FICTION / Short Stories (single author), FICTION / Literary, FICTION / Humorous / General
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Past Praise for The Loss of Leon Meed:
"A madcap parable about an unwitting Houdini named Leon Meed...[which] leaves us hungry for more. Emmons cycles through and illuminates the plights of his diverse, crowded cast-including a recovering alcoholic, an overweight therapist and a Korean hippie-with a finesse that approaches that of a seasoned literary ventriloquist. The characters' stories take on a cumulative, mesmerizing rhythm."
- The New York Times Book Review


"These stories offer compelling portraits of lonely, troubled people surviving on their wits and the kindness of strangers. At once stark and nuanced, serious and playful, the fictions in A Moral Tale further cement Emmons’s reputation as a wry chronicler of West Coast lifestyles."
-Los Angeles Review of Books

“The beauty of Emmons’s book is its intelligence...ingenious in its construction of dilemmas and the ways out of them. He is, as people say, a writer to watch.”
-Colorado Review

“Delightfully bizarre and drolly promiscuous…Emmons’s prose is uniformly eloquent, clean and precise.”
-Numero Cinq

"With sentences of elegant and Jamesian precision, Josh Emmons creates in each of these stories entire worlds in which people try to redeem themselves, in melancholy and often hilarious fashion.”
-Susan Straight, author of Between Heaven and Here and Highwire Moon

"A Moral Tale and Other Tales builds in power as it's being read, one vital and singular narrative after another. Emmons' stories are unsentimental but ethical, blackly humorous yet compassionate, and every page is marbled with insight. This collection is like nothing you'll read this year or next."
-Ken Kalfus, author of A Disorder Peculiar to the Country

"One grasps for parallels to Josh Emmons’ dispatches from human experience at its most non sequitur, but his stories of psychically wayward painters, teen hookers and their haunted inheritances, junkie stunt men without any stunts left, and all the cluster-romances that play out to classical fugues, are as singular as they are irresistible, as resonant later as they are gripping now."
-Steve Erickson, author of Zeroville

“Hilarious, strange, and scarily smart, Josh Emmons’s stories are filled with wisdom, precision, and staggeringly beautiful sentences. Every one of these luminous tales startled and captivated me.”
—Molly Antopol, author of The Unamericans


“An exquisitely strange and deeply intelligent suite of stories about love and desire, how we pursue, deny, and are ultimately—whether we like it or not—defined by both.”
—Vu Tran, author of Dragonfish

“A whip-smart and painfully lucid collection of stories, full of haunting observations and astonishing sentences.”
—Jess Row, author of Your Face in Mine

“Emmons is at his most memorable when he narrows in on sharp satirical details...thought-provoking and incisive.”
-Kirkus Review

Josh Emmons has published two novels, Prescription for a Superior Existence and The Loss of Leon Meed. A regular contributor to The New York Times, People, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, he teaches at UC Riverside and lives with his daughter in Los Angeles, CA. Visit him on the web at joshemmons.com