Praise - Warren Read

One Simple Thing The Lyncher in Me Ash Falls

One Simple Thing

"A gripping tale of crime, intrigue, and complicated family relationships. . . This hard-hitting literary noir is a real knuckle-biter."
—Publisher's Weekly

"Nicely atmospheric with compelling characters and smooth writing, (One Simple Thing) makes for a pleasant diversion during a time of pandemic." —Booklist

". . . mixes compassion and hope among its suspenseful twists." —Foreword Reviews

"With his father suddenly absent, 12 year-old Rodney Culver’s mother takes up with Otis Dell, a fry cook at the local diner—and known petty thief. While Rodney resists the man’s influence at first, he soon realizes resisting Otis is not an easy thing. He is tenacious, determined to groom the boy his accomplice, willing or not.

"After a simple heist goes violently sideways, Rodney becomes an unwitting fugitive, swept away from his mother to the primitive mountain sanctuary of one Lester Fanning—a man with more dirt under his nails than Otis and Rodney combined. “We gotta be invisible for a few days,” Otis tells Rodney. But with Lester’s skeptical lady friend in the way, and the town sheriff grappling with a curiously placed corpse, what once seemed like an easy plan quickly devolves into a knot of complications.

"A tense, layered story of misguided allegiances and sheer desperation, One Simple Thing is the kind of “grit lit” that belongs with such writers as Daniel Woodrell, Per Petterson and Charles Portis.

"One Simple Thing is fit to burst with grit, atmosphere, pathos and suspense. With his expertly paced second novel, Mr. Read invites comparisons to the crime masters of the mid-twentieth century—guys like Chandler, and Thompson, and Willeford." —Jonathan Evison, bestselling author of West of Here and Lawn Boy

"In Warren Read’s stories, setting is a character, stealthy, lush, and full of hidden depths. The very air has texture, holding the characters tight as their small town worlds unfold.

"A twisting, twisted tale full of well-developed characters and dense setting, One Simple Thing is a story that will hold you in its grip until the satisfying end. —Jessica Barksdale Inclán, author of The Burning Hour and When We Almost Drowned

"One Simple Thing is anything but simple. This tense, layered story brings us into the world of hardscrabble folks who are fighting and often failing to get by. Opening on a boy's heart-wrenching journey through the implosion of his family, One Simple Thing flowers into a captivating crime mystery. While tempting to compare Warren Read to classic crime writers, he also vividly chronicles lives lived on the margins, like writers such as Larry Brown or Willy Vlautin." —Thomas Kohnstamm, author of Lake City

"In One Simple Thing, Warren Read intertwines a coming-of-age story with Northwest noir and catapults both into satisfying new territory. Love takes on many guises: loyalty, jealousy, lust, pure folly, absolute treachery. And the novel doesn’t shy from detailing brutal echoes of disruption -- a young boy is left to navigate through the broken glass of his family; a fleeing woman finds an uncertain haven with a backwoods criminal; an aging sheriff tracks a killer while managing his own wild, dementia-struck brother. Lost souls abound and cause trouble, yet Read writes poignantly and sympathetically of isolation and desire, of the strange twists and talents that arise when what the world offers is not enough. Fans of Richard Ford will find much to appreciate and cheer in this lucid and beautifully written novel." —Adrianne Harun, author of A Man Came out of a Door in the Mountain

"Disguised as a tense crime story set in the sparse landscape of the American West, Warren Read’s One Simple Thing is really a probing evocation of loneliness and the ways it skews the search for meaningful relationships. Read writes dialogue as if it were an industrial diamond, sharp and faceted and capable of cutting through granite. Rodney and Otis are as original a set of partners-in-crime as you’ll find in American fiction, and Nadine is trying so hard not to be disappointed in men that she latches onto despair and convinces herself it is hope." —Kent Meyers, bestselling author of Twisted Tree and The Work of Wolves

The Lyncher in Me

A compelling tapestry...a truly important American Story. —Rebecca Walker, author of the New York Times bestsellers "Black, White and Jewish" and "Baby Love".

an unflinching memoir...one of redemption, optimism and joy. —Dinesh Ramde, Associated Press

Like Craig Lesley in Burning Fence before him, Warren Read dares to confront the truths about our families that shape who we are, for good and ill. Read does the bravest thing of all – he shows compassion for these people and for himself. —Kathleen Alcalá, author of "The Desert Remembers My Name".

Of the many thousand descendents of the perpetrators who lynched African Americans with impunity for decades, only a handful have gone public with their stained family legacies. None have done so with more telling effect than Warren Read. —Rich Rusk, author (with Dean Rusk) of "As I Saw It".

A riveting memoir that takes us beyond the Duluth tragedies to the triumph of a life passionately and artfully lived. —Michael Fedo, author of "The Lynchings in Duluth

Skillfully weaves autobiography, history and reflection to pull the reader into both his family's story and America's ongoing struggle with our history of lynching. —James H. Madison, author of "A Lynching in the Heartland: Race and Memory in America".

More than just a story about our nation's all-too-recent history of racial violence, The Lyncher in Me unravels a family's darkest secrets in an account that will linger with readers long after the last page. Surprising, timely, no holes barred. —Ken Olsen, author (with Vernon J. Baker) of "Lasting Valor".

(Read) presents the facts of his personal life and the back story of the Duluth lynching with unflinching honesty and a great deal of effective, poignant writing on a subject that Minnesotans, try as they might, can’t seem to forget. —Minneapolis / St. Paul Magazine

Ash Falls

(Read) meticulously weaves the gritty, hard-knock lives of many men and women from this impoverished, rural town in mountainous Washington into "tight little complicated knots."...A moody, haunting foray into rural Americana in the mold of Daniel Woodrell and Christian Kiefer. —Kirkus Reviews

In this fine first novel, Read deftly portrays the competing feelings of suffocation and loneliness that can breed in small towns. Pair this with Daniel Woodrell's marvelous Tomato Red." —Booklist

Though set in a bleak place at a bleak time, Read's novel ultimately is one of hope. As it winds to its conclusion, each character finds a key to closing the self-created distance between who they are and who they'd like to be, culminating in an extraordinary Christmas Eve act of love. Most readers will enjoy. —Library Journal

A well-crafted, subtle psychological thriller. —Publisher's Weekly

A stunning display of grit made alluring. Both beautiful and stark, Ash Falls is a slice-of-life portrait that gives color to the grayest of times. —Shelf Awareness

Ash Falls is a dynamite debut: keenly observed, well-paced, and dripping with atmosphere. Read’s gritty, hard-knock characters walk off the page. —Jonathan Evison, best-selling author of The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving and West of Here

Bringing to life an astonishing range of characters who are intricately connected with each other, Warren Read’s Ash Falls vividly depicts an out-of-the-way place and a peculiarly American way of life. These pages are memorable and intensely compelling. —David Huddle, author of The Faulkes Chronicle and My Immaculate Assassin

Warren Read’s Ash Falls is a rare, multi-faceted treasure: at once a gripping narrative of tragedy and its aftermath and a psychologically rich portrait of small-town life in the contemporary rural West, the novel is above all a nuanced exploration of isolation and the solace of intimacy. All his characters—from an aging mink farmer, to a middle-aged pot dealer, to a single mother, to a gay teenager with an escaped convict for a father—are so real and complex I sometimes forget I haven’t encountered them in the actual world. This is a book to read, read again, and pass on to all your literature-loving friends. —Scott Nadelson, author of Between You and Me and Aftermath

ASH FALLS is a subtle novel that interweaves the stories of these characters into a single world. Every action ties in to every other action, evoking the mystery of how individuals (and fate) form communities, and communities (and fate) form individuals. It is a world of common decencies and common cruelties, kindness and endurance and compassion and betrayals, well-tended old scars, and freshly opened new ones. —David Allan Cates, author of the novels, Freeman Walker, Ben Armstrong's Strange Trip Home, and Tom Connor's Gift

An escaped convict, a gay mink wrangler, and an abused, pregnant teenage bride are not characters one runs into every day. Warren Read’s gift for the cinematic makes Ash Falls a rewarding and riveting journey. I love this book. —Actor/director Dinah Manoff, Ordinary People, Empty Nest

Warren Read’s Ash Falls is one of those compelling novels that works into your awareness in layers until, almost without knowing it, you find yourself involved with a whole community of intersecting lives. This is sophisticated storytelling, quiet and unpredictable and gorgeous. Read creates characters with such precision and exactitude that the book has the quality of a Vermeer painting, of people captured in moments of their ordinary, miraculous, so-lit lives. —Kent Meyers, author of New York Times bestsellers The Work of Wolvesand Twisted Tree.

Warren Read spins an engrossing and eloquent narrative that sharpens our moral conscience through the power of a great story. Ash Falls is a gift of a book, and a delicious place to lose yourself in an immersing read. —Carol Cassella, best-selling author of Oxygen, Gemini and Healer.

Mark Brownn