This World Will Never Run Out of Strangers

There’s a peculiar set of contrasts that exists in tiny college towns, one that John Waddy Bullion deftly captures in his collection This World Will Never Run Out of Strangers. Anyone who’s grown up or studied in one (or read Denis Johnson, who likely would have admired this collection) will recognize the renderings: the married professor and his short-skirted student sitting in the front row; the frustrated townie watching all his buddies leave to find their fortunes elsewhere; the overeager adjunct facing the piles of dreadful essays she must grade until dawn.

But while we may think we know the players, in Bullion’s generous and observant hands they manage to leave their microcosm and become more than tropes. The characters in this intertwined collection are mischievous, abandoning their prescribed roles and flipping their scripts. Students teach professors a thing or two; some townies do manage to up and leave. Bullion shows us that small-town trappings can also make a person clever, and with the right attitude, mishaps can become boons.

In a time when education is so suspect that bluebooks are back and robots are fact-checking themselves, Bullion’s fictional campuses are alive with unexpected teachings—and hope, even, for a future when we realize there are lessons all over the place, often in the form of strangers who wind up being friends.

- Dina Guidubaldi, author of How Gone We Got

Imagine that you can at last know the stories of those random faces you might have passed on the streets of some small American city you drive through --the regulars at a pizza dive, a boy hitchhiking in the rain, the manager of an adult-content emporium. American fiction's strength has always been its penchant for taking us into the borderlands that smudge any sharp distinction between the epic and the comic, and that's exactly what Bullion does here. He is particularly adept at capturing the precarity of boyhood, placing him in the same literary lineage that gave us Barry Hannah and George Saunders. Reading these stories is like coming across the Teacher's Edition, the one that includes the mysterious answers, if you know where to look. 

- Cynthia Shearer, author of The Wonder Book of the Air and The Celestial Jukebox

This is vibrant and crackling work full of the kind of American talk I most want to read: specific, strange, eerily familiar. I love the oddness and warmth in these stories.

- Alex Higley, author of True Failure

Settle in for a real show, reader! Like John Cheever, Mary Robison, and George Singleton before him, John Waddy Bullion’s learned what happens when hilarity and heartbreak combine. As well, in these nine knockout stories, he operates with formal dexterity, unforgettable characters, and a striking voice. What a rare and original debut! 

- Tom Williams, author of Among the Wild Mulattos and Other Tales

This collection of loosely connected stories reminds us that, no matter how much we crave connection and a sense of belonging, we often fail to achieve it to any degree of satisfaction--and sometimes not at all. Bullion’s young men do their very best, however, to forge identities in a lonely, latchkey landscape of a Missouri college town, where parents are checked-out, if not absent, and the love is tough, if present at all. Now, this may sound like rough sledding, but its bite and poignancy are perfectly balanced with what is often riotous humor. Such a potent mixture is a rarity in today’s fiction, which is why this collection is a thing to celebrate and share.

- Kevin Grauke, author of Shadows of Men and Yonderites