Bill Gaythwaite's revelatory collection makes me fall in love with reading again. So immersive are these sharp, quick-witted, and intricately observed stories that, in fact, they make me forget I was reading at all. Amaster at conveying emotions, Gaythwaite is particularly gifted at evoking the ones which are usually lower pitched -- nostalgia, regret, and longing -- making them as loud, palpable, and dramatic as the more chest-thumping emotions of rage and anger. Maybe that's because these stories aren't so much about loss or the past but the necessity to face them in order to move on. Not that it's easy. Often, these characters come from small towns and small lives best left behind and forgotten, and as they bet on themselves and seek bigger lives in other places, they sometimes find that they must make choices that betray themselves and others for reasons that are heartbreakingly human. A moving, incisive collection of big-hearted stories that reverberate well past their reading.--Caroline Kim, author of The Prince of Mournful Thoughts and Other Stories

Gaythwaite delves into the secret lives of his seemingly ordinary protagonists in this contemplative collection of 11 stories.... [These] stories get a great deal of mileage from what goes unsaid, sidestepping melodrama and leaving the reader to consider the impact of the characters' tumultuous pasts on their current lives. There's much to admire in this well-crafted collection.-- "Publishers Weekly"

In the tradition of Chekhov, Bill Gaythwaite writes stories about outwardly unremarkable people with remarkable inner lives. Funny, smart, intermittently heartbreaking, the stories in A Place in the World eschew literary pyrotechnics and privilege the art of storytelling. A fine collection.--David Leavitt

When you read a writer who slowly and precisely loves his characters into being, the love that fuels the story gets transferred to you; this is why reading a good book of stories can return you back to your own life feeling more generous, and in the case of an excellent writer like Bill Gaythwaite, more insightful, and more patient. Bill Gaythwaite is masterful at giving us wonderfully flawed characters whose ways of seeing their world, and their selves, make them curiously endearing.-- "Pittsburgh Review of Books"