Wine Press Short Stories - Collection of Engaging Fiction for Book Lovers | Perfect for Relaxing Evenings & Book Club Discussions

Joshua Hren’s latest collection, In the Wine Press, exhibits thirteen stories, exploring quiet subjects: “Horseradish”, a father and son digging up memories on a porch they built together, the father teaching his son the power of a simple, romantic embrace; “A Little Bank In My Soul”, a story in letter form written from a man to his ex who ran out on him, trying to sort out each other’s possessions while also working out the guilt from the actions leading to their separation; “Some Other Exit”, a strung out married couple avoiding each other and finding distraction in Excel spreadsheets and ‘Contrology’ ( a self-help class consisting of watered down western spirituality) and trying to reign in their punk-rocker teenager.Hren also explores those not so quiet subjects too, the subjects one may find on the front page of the Times or Post: we see Hren’s exploration of the clerical sex abuse scandal in “Work of Human Hands”, a priest calculating his preying of a vulnerable school boy; also in “Tears in Things”, a diocesan worker urged to get rid of evidence documenting priests pattern of repeated sexual abuse. In “Natural Causes” board members of a high financial company are left without choice to respond an intern’s death after working seventy-seven hours straight, a work ethic that they can only describe as “a kind of prayer for him.”Hren’s prose, just as in his previous collection This Our Exile, is always aware of details. Seemingly minor details reveal the world in his characters inhabit, such as in “Horseradish”: here we see a father and son, standing, mostly in silence, on a shoddy porch they built together: the porch’s floor made of a faux wood, laminated with a cocktail of likely cancerous chemicals, made by a Dutch lumber company that manufactures in China, which is at the forefront of a class action lawsuit. The father hopes to unburden the lives of his children with the money from this same lawsuit, otherwise to die in a mountain of debt. We see here from a seemingly banal laminate floor, the context, the world which Blaise and his father inhabit and the class in which they are a part of.Hren’s imagery is visual throughout the collection too. It’s uniquely Midwestern at times, specifically the lands of Wisconsin. Just as in his collection This Our Exile, there’s a sense of place. One pictures the warn out streets of Wisconsin’s cities with Cody “watching boards replace windows as he went down the line” (“Their Fire is Not Quenched”), or young Billy’s hair that “was laid densely around his head, hay-colored like roofs in Northern Wisconsin towns, falling down around his forehead in a mussed way” (“Sick at the Thought”).Good fiction, as Dana Gioia says, should “reject a bankrupt or moribund status quo and articulate a compelling new vision.” Hren’s collection passes this test. His characters look for meaning in a post-industrial world and find bits of wisdom in the rubble. These are stories that are worth your time and consideration.