Redemption Center

Redemption Center, a collection of stories by professor and musician Vincent Craig Wright, delivers a funny, troubling, and sometimes hallucinatory look at modern American life, love, faith (or lack of it), and work (ditto). Wright's characters tend to live on the margins of society--gamblers, motel maids, phone psychics, drug dealers, and guys on the dole--and often speak in a compressed vernacular, as though pronouns and articles use up more energy than they're worth. And yet it's not as though these folks are in a rush to get anywhere. A strange fatalism pervades many of their stories. Life may not be great where they live, but it probably won't be better anywhere else. Still, the book is far from bleak. Characters locate grace in the simplest things: building a wall, remembering the way a friend once gently held a bird, coasting downhill on a bike. An understated humor suffuses the collection, and the optimism of the child narrating the title story trumps any number of sad moments elsewhere.

"Redemption Center is a splendid collection of stories by a natural storyteller who can grab a reader with absolutely irresistible first sentences (an all-too-rare talent) and then never let go. Vincent Craig Wright has got the Gift, and I now stand ready to eagerly read anything he writes."-- Robert Olen Butler

"As the book's title suggests, he attends to the ruggedly specific, like drab shopping centers where beaten-down folks trade Green Stamps for promising goods, while keeping one eye on transcendence. "Redemption" implies a mysterious process (maybe the stamps will deliver an unexpected treasure) where philosophy is not in play so much as faith and forgiveness. In Wright's world, idealism and realism collide in small-town churches, fly-by-night phone service businesses, dust-filled highway intersections, and hillsides alight with candles spelling the obscure messages of a crackpot/prophet. "There ain't nothing to point out," says an observer of these flaming hillside words. "Or there's everything." The world is what it is, ruggedly specific; yet we suspect there's something more."-- Tracy Daugherty, American Book Review