{"product_id":"9780814340158","title":"Quality Snacks","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn a wide range of forms and tones, the fifteen stories in Andy Mozina’s new collection, \u003ci\u003eQuality Snacks,\u003c\/i\u003e center on high-stakes performances by characters trying to gratify both deep and superficial needs, often with unexpected consequences. Driven by strange ambitions, bungled love, and a taste for—or abject fear of—physical danger, the collection’s characters enact the paradox in the concept of a quality snack: the dream of transmuting the mundane into something extraordinary.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTwo teenage boys play chicken on a Milwaukee freeway. A man experiencing a career crisis watches a seventy-four-year-old great grandmother perform an aerial acrobatics routine at the top of a swaying 110-foot pole. Desperate to find a full-time job, a pizza delivery man is fooled into a humiliating sexual demonstration by a couple at a Midway Motor Lodge. A troubled young man tries to end his father’s verbal harassment by successfully hunting a polar bear. After an elf civil war destroys his Christmas operation, Santa Claus reinvents himself as a one-man baseball team and ends up desperate to win a single game. And in the title story, a flavor engineer at Frito-Lay tries to win his boss’s heart with a new strategy for Doritos that aims to reposition the brand from snack food to main course. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhile some stories embrace pathos and some are humorous and some are realistic and some contain surreal elements, all of the stories in \u003ci\u003eQuality Snacks \u003c\/i\u003eshare striking insight and a cast of compelling, well-conceived characters. This collection, in an earlier form, has been a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Award, the Dzanc Short Story Collection Contest, the Elixir Press Fiction Award, and the Autumn House Fiction Contest, and a semi-finalist for the Mary McCarthy Prize. Readers of fiction will be satisfied by the variety of fare offered by \u003ci\u003eQuality Snacks\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Wayne State University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47026635505904,"sku":"9780814340158","price":18.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780814340158_p0.jpg?v=1763744883","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780814340158","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}