Two Californias: Book Launch

Free and open to the public

Robert Glick is an Associate Professor of English at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he teaches creative writing, electronic literature, and the occasional course on zombies. His work has won competitions from The Normal School, Copper Nickel, Diagram, Summer Literary Seminars, and New Ohio Review; other stories have been published in the Masters Review, Denver Quarterly, and Gettysburg Review. His first collection, Two Californias, was published by C&R Press in 2019. 

Quirky, bittersweet, and darkly funny, Robert Glick laces the psychological realism of family drama with lyric, associative language and intricate plot structures. From the suburbs of Los Angeles to the countercultures of the Bay Area, the emotionally powerful, intricately woven stories in Two Californias explore the unexpected and unorthodox ways we come to terms with everyday tragedies.

“In Robert Glick’s bravura collection — in which, by way of ambiance, old-fashioned pencil sharpeners seem to turn in character’s stomachs and four-pound postage scales are set to spin, by imagined overburden, upwards of 70 times — sad boys hide in trunks and covered jacuzzis, grandmothers rise from the dead and mermaids on matte silver pedestals have their heads taken off with chainsaws. Two Californias is a fizzing, crackling, nightmarish wonderfest. I was in from the dusty oaks in the first paragraph to the rattlesnake in the last.”

–Laird Hunt, author of Kind One and The Evening Road