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Praise for The Innocent and Others
"In these masterfully crafted stories, Jerry Whitus writes with tremendous grace and precision about the complex inner lives of his characters: their longings and regrets, their reckonings with the past, their fears about an uncertain future. Like Chekov, he has a remarkable ability to capture the extraordinary in the most ordinary moments of life and imbue these moments with a profound sense of empathy and insight. This is a phenomenal collection, one that will linger in the reader’s mind long after the last page is turned, one that I’ll be revisiting myself for many years to come."
Andrew Porter
author of The Disappeared, In Between Days, and The Theory of Light and Matter Feedback
"The thirteen stories in Jerry Whitus’s richly evocative collection, The Innocent and Others, immerse us in a world of black water sloughs, small towns, shadowlands, and prophetic owls along with not quite ordinary and lyrical characters. Set mostly in deep East Texas, these are deeply satisfying stories of revenge, retribution and redemption, stories full of stunning surprises and gripping tension rarely seen in contemporary fiction. Five stars on this one."
C.W. Smith
author of Girl Flees Circus, The Museum of Marriage, and Steplings
"Who is innocent? Not the morally compromised characters in this riveting collection. Not you, reader; not me. A boy goes into the woods and fails to acknowledge the awful thing he discovers. A man walks out of a coffee shop and makes a mistake that might destroy a boy’s life. Fifty years after witnessing an abusive situation and keeping quiet about it, a woman lashes out like a child. In these elegantly structured stories, Whitus explores the gaps between what we see and do and what we suspect in our guts is right. These stories disturb—and entertain—as they reveal guilty secrets, deceptions, and a shimmering glimpse of self-knowledge.​"
Polly Rosenwaike
author of Look How Happy I’m Making You
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