Fiction. A sham pastor hires a cocaine-sniffing centaur to act as mascot for an Evangelical mega-church's arena football team; Paul Revere flashes across a revolutionary sky on the back of a sunbird; an ammo-less infantry drummer and a bleeding medic are beat back to a Best Western parking lot in the Battle of Sacramento—such are the situations contained in Ryan Ridge's HUNTERS & GAMBLERS. Winners of the negative lottery, these characters have learned to love to lose everything until there's nothing left to lose. And the end is desperate, black, drenched in whiskey, but punctuated by poignancy and revelry and revelation. The tales in this lurid, edgy debut illuminate blackness with even blacker humor and a sense of outlandish beauty.

Author City: LONG BEACH, CA USA

Ryan Ridge lives in Long Beach, California. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Mississippi Review, Fractured West, Salt Hill, The Los Angeles Review, Juked, and PANK, among others. He teaches at the University of California, Irvine.

Reviews and Other Links
author site