Theft

REVIEWS
"Easy to forget all around us are worlds in motion with lives larger or smaller than our own involved in most of the similar intricacies it takes to survive, to live, to struggle, to love, suffer, procreate, laugh or just stand still. What's not so easy is the ability to take all these individual identities and have them stand out in their worlds of activity where normally they might not. John Abbott's ability to allow his characters and their situations to stand out on the page is something one gets in the exchange that takes place between he and his reader. Theft: And Other Tales of Loss and the Working Class masterfully accomplishes the deepest part of this relationship and offers the reader something unique, something apart from the expected, and from the commonplace in the name of a reality running parallel to our own and right before our eyes." - Paul B. Roth, editor & publisher The Bitter

"John Abbott's stories remind me of those writers like Chekhov and de Maupassant. They have the same control of language, the same wry affection for their characters, the same understanding of, as Faulkner put, "the human heart in conflict with itself." Every moment of emotion in these stories is earned, and the stories' mastery literally jumps off the page when I read them. The work here is serious without being self-serious, funny without being easy, and always engaging." - Steven Carter, author of I Was Howard Hughes and Famous Writers School

"This is a dazzling story collection about ordinary people in extraordinary moments, and Abbott give us these moments, beautifully, in lucid prose." - J.D. Dolan, author of Phoenix: A Brother's Life