Books & Books and Miami Book Fair present…

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A heartfelt, daring, divinely hilarious debut novel about a priest who embarks on a fateful journey with a pistol in his pocket and an injured coyote in his backseat.

Father Dan is homeless. Dismissed by his conservative diocese for eccentricity and insubordination, he’s made his exile into a kind of pilgrimage, transforming his Toyota Camry into a mobile monk’s cell. Like the ascetic religious philosophers he idolizes, he intends to spend his trip in peaceful contemplation. But then he sees a minivan sideswipe a coyote. Unable to suppress his Franciscan impulses, he takes the wild animal in, wrapping its broken leg with an old T-shirt and feeding it Spam with a plastic spoon.

With his unexpected canine companion in the backseat, Dan makes his way west, encountering other offbeat travelers and stopping to take in the occasional roadside novelty (MARTIN’S HOLE TO HELL, WORLD-FAMOUS BOTTOMLESS PIT NEXT EXIT!). But the coyote is far from the only oddity fate has delivered into this churchless priest’s care: it has also given him a bone-handled pistol, a box of bullets, and a letter from his estranged friend Paul—a summons of sorts, pulling him forward.

By the time Dan gets to where he’s going, he’ll be forced to reckon once and for all with the great mistakes of his past, and he will have to decide: is penance better paid with revenge, or with redemption?

Daniel Hornsby was born in Muncie, Indiana. He holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan, where he received Hopwood Awards for both short fiction and the novel, and an M.T.S. from Harvard Divinity School. His stories and essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Electric Literature, The Missouri Review, and Joyland. He lives in Memphis, Tennessee.

Courtney Sender’s fiction appears with The Kenyon Review, AGNI, American Short Fiction, Tin House, Slice, The Georgia Review, and many others. Her essays and articles appear in The New York Times’ Modern Love, The Atlantic, The Lily at Washington Post, Salon, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and others.

She has won the Graywolf Press first novel chapter contest, the Glimmer Train fiction open, the Boulevard Emerging Writers contest, the Mississippi Review fiction contest, the Lawrence Prize for best story in Michigan Quarterly Review, the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival fiction contest, and the Glenna Luschei Award from Prairie Schooner.

Courtney holds an MFA from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars and a B.A. from Yale University, and has taught creative writing at both schools.

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Via Negativa: An Evening with Daniel Hornsby and Courtney Sender