North of Ordinary

The long-awaited return of a quintessentially American storyteller

“You’re as likely to be hit twice by lightning on a Monday as see a wood chipper pull a man into its maw.”

So begins North of Ordinary, John Rolfe Gardner’s virtuosic story collection of survivors getting by despite the odds in a shifting world. In these pages, we meet a nervous young apprentice to a weathered tree climber; a dangerously obsessed student at a Southern Bible college; an attractive schemer trying to build an aud...