Hi, and welcome to my first Substack newsletter.
Some housekeeping to start. I have been consolidating my social-media platforms, which included transferring MailChimp newsletter subscribers to here on Substack. Because you are now a Substack subscriber, I have made you a *free* subscriber, which means you’ll receive content that *paid* subscribers will also receive. I will keep this option in place for new subscribers until 31 January 2022. If you know anyone who might like to read my Substack content, please forward this post or mention it: they can take advantage of this option too. Readers, whether they stay for a while or a short time, are a reason why I write and share my work.
Now, onto the good stuff.
Story – “Skeleton Key”
“Skeleton Key” is not only flash fiction at 976 words but also my first Substack post—and in time for Halloween.
October (2021)
October, my third novel, is now available.
Faced with increasing loneliness and mortality, Patty Pemberton is torn between a past she honors, a present she assumes is stable, and a future she doesn’t know how to plan for. After a new friend disappears from her life, and as autumn deepens and the year’s end closes in, she journeys into her community and the places and histories binding them all—and haunting her—until she arrives at what is most important while hoping her friend returns. Rich with characters and locations, as well as personal and public chronicles, October is a moving and compassionate meditation on life, love, memory, and death.
Every day, I move between Saul and Ray. And although Ray has been gone for a while and I live alone, I am never alone because he and our images when we were together and Saul and his image have me. One photo greets me, like a face in a crowd, and the other image, more familiar over time, also comes and goes. Both photos have been with me at peaks, in valleys, and on the plains in between. I pass by them daily and nightly, month to month, but I should only have one.
2021
324 pages
ISBN (print): 9780578866536
ISBN (ebook): 9780578866574
A Fine Day Will Burn Through: Stories (2021)
Hollywood and Japan. The South and Midwest. Outer space and back home. Past and present. Myths and truths. Expectations and desires. Animals and humans. A storage locker and a softball game. A school play and an art installation. A bar mitzvah and an old tattoo. William Auten’s new fifteen-story collection A Fine Day Will Burn Through (including stories first published in Thoughtful Dog, BULL, museum of americana, The McNeese Review, Barely South Review, Slush Pile Magazine, Valparaiso Fiction Review) bridges cultures and explores how people of all ages try to reach for—and sometimes miss—each other. In circumstances both mundane and surprising, these characters wend their way through a contemporary world of excess and restraint, noise and silence, urgency and patience, regret and grace.
2021
286 pages
ISBN (print): 9780578866567
ISBN (ebook): 9780578866604
Praise for A Fine Day Will Burn Through
Some books of short stories are all the same. Not this one. Each story is different: a different main character, different plot, different situation the characters find themselves in. An excellent book—both stimulating and therapeutic.
—BookWorm
In Another Sun (2020)
In Another Sun is a lovely and eloquent novel looking at one woman’s journey toward, and away from, the American Dream. We follow its protagonist, the child of Mexican immigrants, through love and loss, career ascent, and personal crisis. It’s a specific and detailed story focused on one slice of the American experience; it’s also a great general look at ambition and grace and identity, at the goals that shape our lives—only to leave us longing for something else.
In Another Sun, my second novel, is available from Tortoise Books.
Praise for In Another Sun
In Another Sun tells the story of Vanessa Ochoa in a simultaneously urgent and unhurried voice, as she searches for a bridge between the known and the unknown in a too-short life. The novel pulses between the past and future, disappointment and possibility, with the steady surge of the Pacific toward which Vanessa is steadily aimed. In chronicling her journey with grace and empathy, Auten also shows how the American Dream, hatched in hope, can sour within a generation. It’s a moving, heartbreaking, and thoroughly immersive story. I’ll miss Vanessa, her insistent voice and her lost chances haunting long after the last page.
—Jeff Ewing, author of The Middle Ground
William Auten’s In Another Sun burns with haunting fire; it reminds us that our lives are often only truly experienced in fragments. We exist through the shards of our memories, through snippets of conversations, through what is and what could have been. Auten’s prose thoughtfully explores the powerful notion that, perhaps above all, our heart’s desire is simply to be known.
—Debbie Graber, author of Kevin Kramer Starts on Monday
Auten’s writing is lyrical, propulsive, and alive. In Another Sun is peopled with characters that will be familiar, but this is not a story you’ve read before. I was reminded of C.E. Morgan and that is high praise. Read this book.
—Alex Higley, author of Old Open
The ephemeral meets the inevitable in William Auten’s novel, In Another Sun. This story is a gift of words, strung together like beads on a twisting strand, leading us forward and backwards through Vanessa Ochoa’s life. Her reflective journey is an ode to time and grace, a story of lives intersecting and loves lost, of treasured connections and faith restored. Beautifully rendered and mesmerizing, In Another Sun is a book to treasure.
—Alice Kaltman, author of Staggerwing and Wavehouse
Housekeeping
Because a writer’s success can thrive with word-of-mouth and grassroots marketing, please help spread the word about my work. One of these following actions from you can positively impact me and my work:
Buy my books.
Recommend my work to friends, acquaintances, and book clubs.
Suggest my books to libraries and local bookstores.
Share my work on social-media accounts.
Add and rate my books on BookBub, Goodreads, and other platforms devoted to books; fiction; reading; and American culture.
Thank you for your support in its many forms. See y’all next month.
William