Coming Fall 2026
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The lion’s share of short stories in Stephen Amidon’s second collection explore the frayed but unbreakable bonds between fathers and sons. In them, inheritances are as likely to be dark burdens as liberating fortunes. In Amidon’s world, even the most benign undertakings - a model car race, a visit to a self-help workshop - can turn into rites of passage.
In ‘Bat Day,’ a father and son’s trip to Yankee Stadium turns into a sinister exploration of the dark side of masculinity. In ‘Scary Movies,’ a visit to a Saturday morning matinee provides a view into the realities of American fear. In ‘Cowboys,’ a man’s discovery of his father’s secret past shines a light on his own shortcomings. And in the title story, a man’s reunion with his long lost father takes him on a journey into a shared fascination with the world’s darker precincts. Echolocation is Stephen Amidon’s first collection of stories since the highly acclaimed Subdivision (1991). It is the work of a writer who well understands the painful complexities of the American Dream. Praise for stories in EcholocationStephen Amidon’s wry “Cowboys” gives us all we need to know of three generations in a masterpiece of compression. Literary Review
“ ‘Echolocation’…Stephen Amidon’s fragmentary narrative of a man hiding from domesticity and from humanity itself has an appalling strength, the apparent impoverishment of its prose matching the emotional blankness which gives its events the inescapable matter-of-factness of nightmare.” Lucy Hughes-Hallett, The Spectator |
