The stories in Get a Grip depict a range of imagined lives. There are Estonian brothers trekking from their blighted neighborhood to a college interview. There’s a TV meteorite hunter in town to search for otherworldly treasure. We meet a widow addicted to physical pain and a successful ad executive who loses all his worldly possessions in one day. 

All of the characters work out their struggles in the Baltimore region, channeling, in turns, the area’s charm, its despair, its humor, its self-doubt, its compassion. Get a Grip is a book about who we are when the cameras are off and the phone has died.

“In her smart and beautifully observed stories, Kathy Flann drops us straight into the complex lives of a collection of imperfect strivers, who want love, want to be good, or want somehow to transcend their makeshift existences, and who are often their own worst enemies. Each of these tales is simultaneously a portrait of its grim-funny, yet touching protagonist and of a land, very like the United States, where everything is possible, and nothing is quite what it should be.” --Stephen O’Connor

Author: Kathy Flann
Publisher: Texas Review Press
Page Count: 160pp
Size: 5.5 x 8.5
Notes: softcover
Date of Publication: November 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-1680030518