Stadler Center Writers Series

Christopher Coake
Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Fiction Reading
7 p.m. Bucknell Hall

 

 

Christopher Coake is the author of the novel You Came Back (Grand Central, 2012) as well as the collection of short stories We're in Trouble (Harcourt 2005), which won the PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship. In addition, Coake was listed among "Granta's Best of Young American Novelists" in 2007. His stories have been published in several literary journals, and anthologized in Best American Mystery Stories 2004 and Best American Noir of the Century. A native Hoosier, he received his M.F.A. in fiction from Ohio State University. He and his wife Stephanie Lauer live in Reno, where Coake is a professor of English at the University of Nevada.

Click here to read an interview with Coake by Stadler Center intern Lauren Feldman.

 

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Christopher Coake

from You Came Back

 

Mark had been dreaming of his son, Brendan, who had died on a cold January day several years before, just weeks after his seventh birthday. The dream was an enemy whose tactics were familiar, intimate. In it, Mark and Brendan's mother-Mark's ex-wife, Chloe-were still living in their old two-story brick house in Victorian Village, on the far side of downtown. In the dream their old, rambling home had become a labyrinth: Floors had traded places; new hallways branched into shadows; doors had been smoothed over into plaster walls. Brendan was still alive, running from them, laughing, calling them, always out of sight, but in this strange new house they could never catch him; they could never tell him to be careful, to wait for them, to take his time on the stairs.

And then Mark was awake, and seven years had passed, and instead of Chloe's tear-streaked, panicked face beside him, he saw only Allison's peering down at him, her dark eyes alight, excited by the snowfall.

Copyright 2012, Christopher Coake, from You Came Back. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2012.