After Arson: New & Selected Essays Gary Finke. Text is in yellow superimposed over an abstract painting of a pregnant woman that may also be mother earth? The colors are bright and swirling in a chaotic background.

After Arson

This item will be released October 21, 2025.

New & Selected Essays by Gary Fincke

ISBN: 978-1-963695-21-2 paperback $24.95
ISBN: 978-1-963695-22-9 ebook $9.99

October 21, 2025

This essay collection spans a lifetime’s worth of characters, settings, themes, and ways of organizing. It is, after all, a collection of Gary Fincke’s best work. Yet, for the variety of content covered, from coming-of-age to family to nuclear weapons to space exploration to mass shootings to rock attacks on cars to the author’s mother’s obsession with potato chips, this collection has a durable thread that ties them all together: the need to observe and record everything. Struggle and resilience. Fear and pleasure. Faith and despair. Love and loathing. All of those tensions are closely examined within the shadow cast by death. As Gary Fincke writes, “Somewhere, early every day, I think the acolyte of terror dreams our bodies as it decides the exact address for delight.” This “thinking,” in essay after essay, is brilliantly articulated in an ever-evolving, contemporary style. The metaphors are beautiful, the prose is clipped and clean, and the reader is constantly surprised by the connections Fincke draws like the one between his daughter and Charles Manson. A panorama of screams, another of hearts, another of headlights, all of them transformed into memoir. The subjects as varied as a four-part exploration of different kinds of hands, a meditation on terror and the fireworks American children know as Sparklers, and eulogies seeded by love of potato chips and crossword puzzles. Like the best essays, all of these “discover” in an intimate, personal way.

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After Arson

New & Selected Essays by Gary Fincke

ISBN: 978-1-963695-21-2 paperback $24.95
ISBN: 978-1-963695-22-9 ebook $9.99

October 21, 2025

Praise for After Arson: New & Selected Essays by Gary Fincke

These straightforward and often beautifully interwoven essays by an outstanding storyteller and poet go straight to the heart of our common humanity. With candor, compassion, and an unobtrusive erudition, they probe the varieties of human vulnerability and remind us of the vigilance all real love requires.—Robert Atwan, Series Editor, Best American Essays

Gary Fincke’s essays are wise, elegant, fun, and profoundly moving. Beautifully written, Fincke’s writings take the classic form of a braided essay and crochet, quilt, weave, and felt together research and memories until you can’t tell anymore where your own mind ends and the mind of one of our great living essayists begins. This collection of essays is a treasure readers will return to again and again.—Kathryn Nuernberger, author of The Witch of Eye

Gary Fincke’s New and Selected Essays compiles an accomplished and impressive span of work—representing the outstanding breadth and depth of Fincke’s longstanding exploration of the art of the essay. Fincke’s essays are supple and innovative in their use of form, rich with associative juxtapositions, and wide-ranging in their movement. His keenly-honed sense of detail, paired with the eye and ear of a poet, make these riveting essays shimmer and linger. Gary Fincke’s New and Selected Essays is a gorgeous tour de force.—Lee Horikoshi Roripaugh, Author of Reveal Codes

Author Gary Finke. Stands with a dramatic background on a coast with an observatory in the background. Finke has gray hair cut short with a beard on his chin and a wry smile. He wears a dark colored fleece overshirt.Gary Fincke has published five collections of essays, Including The Darkness Call, which won the Robert C. Jones Prize (Pleiades Press, 2018). Individual essays have been reprinted in Best American Essays and The Pushcart Prize. His short story collections have been published by Coffee House, Missouri, and West Virginia and have won the Flannery O’Connor Prize and the Elixir Press Fiction Prize. Collections of his poetry have won book prizes offered by Ohio State, Michigan State, Arkansas, Stephen. F. Austin, and Jacar.

Author photo by Aaron Fincke

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