The Formalist Fiction Writer

Camp Olvido named one of the best novellas of 2015

“There are some books when, after you finish them, leave you breathless, quiet, and thoughtful. Camp Olvido stunned me into silence. I sat there with this universe in my hand for the longest time.”
Camp Olvido was named one of the best novellas of 2015 by David Abrams at The Quivering Pen.  The list included Mesilla, by Robert James Russell, and On the Island at the Center of the Center of the World, by Elizabeth Kadetsky.

Midwest Book Review of “Camp Olvido”

Midwest Book Review featured Camp Olvido in its December Bookwatch.  “A fully absorbing novella by a true master of the storytelling arts, Camp Olvido  by novelist Lawrence Coates is a highly recommended and deftly crafted literary work that will linger in the mind and memory long after it is finished and set back upon the shelf.”

University of Utah’s Reading Room

The University of Utah’s Alumni Connection featured Camp Olvido in their Reading Room feature.

In the California heartland in 1932, at a migrant labor camp whose very name means “forgotten,” a child’s sudden illness leads to tensions between workers wishing to break camp and the land barons enforcing their contracts. Into this dispute, Esteban Alas—contrabandista and self-styled businessman—is reluctantly drawn as a mediator, until an act of violence forces him into a more tragic role.

Article/Review in the Sentinel Tribune

Frances Brent, of the Sentinel – Tribunecalls The Goodbye House a winner.

“Like its predecessors the setting (of The Goodbye House) is California’s ever redefined Santa Clara Valley. Once orchards and vineyards thrived. The farmland is now the Silicon Valley of modern mythology with technology the failing or bumper crop. In 2003 its citizens are enduring the melancholy of 9/11 and the dot com collapse. It is an era of lowered expectations. The mood is nostalgic – not sentimental. The past is recognized, honored, unmourned. Coates’ achievement – a universal, at times comic, modern family tale weaving time and setting into action.”

Sentinel – TribuneOctober 28, 2015

Zoom News

“A novel both of homecoming and leave-taking, The Goodbye House, with its blue-and-white clouds cover, illuminates with a generous spirit the life of a family and a region during a time of change.”

Zoom News, September 24, 2015

About Lawrence

Lawrence Coates is the author of five books, most recently The Goodbye House. His work has been recognized with the Western States Book Award in Fiction, the Donald Barthelme Prize in Short Prose, the Miami University Press Novella Prize, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction. He currently teaches in the MFA program at Bowling Green State University.

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