Praise for Root and Shoot
"If real life is stranger than fiction, Nathan Leslie's new collection Root and Shoot is the splendid exception. Vivid, bizarre, and hilarious, each individual piece of short fiction forms a mosaic of the everyday and the extraordinary. From a man adrift after a recent divorce and hired to commit arson, to a woman who gives birth to a spoon, each of these stories contains characters that you couldn't forget if you tried."
—Amelia Fisher, The Literary Review
"I'd have said these characters would 'feel at home' in a Ray Carver story, but these are characters that precisely do not feel 'at home.' Ever. These same kinds of characters appear vividly throughout the fifty-two stories in Root and Shoot, only now they seem even to take on a Dostoyevskian tinge. Think Notes from Underground."
—Charles Rammelkamp, The Potomac
"Nathan Leslie, in his new collection Root and Shoot, quietly propels the reader through short after short, making a case for himself as a flash writer worth paying attention to."
—AfterthePause.com
Nathan Leslie's nine previous books of fiction include Root and Shoot, Sibs and Drivers. Nathan published Root and Shoot in 2015 with Texture Press. He is also the author of The Tall Tale of Tommy Twice, a novel, and the poetry collection Night Sweat and his work has appeared in hundreds of literary magazines including Boulevard, Shenandoah, North American Review, and Cimarron Review. Nathan was series editor for The Best of the Web anthology 2008 and 2009 (Dzanc Books) and edited fiction for Pedestal Magazine for many years. He is currently interviews editor at Prick of the Spindle and he writes a monthly music column for Atticus Review. His work appeared in Best Small Fictions 2016. Check him out on Twitter and Facebook as well as at www.nathanleslie.com.
