Celadon Books is excited to announce the acquisition of the short story collection WE LOVE ANDERSON COOPER by R.L. Maizes. When the submission landed in Senior Vice President and Co-Publisher Deb Futter’s inbox from Victoria Sanders at Victoria Sanders & Associates, she was quickly drawn in by the title alone. What followed were humorous, astute, quirky, compassionate stories that Deb knew would be an asset to the Celadon list.
In WE LOVE ANDERSON COOPER, characters are treated as outsiders because of their sexual orientation, racial or religious identity, or simply because they look different. A young man courts the publicity that comes from outing himself at his bar mitzvah. When a painter is shunned because of his appearance, he inks tattoos that turn into living flesh. A Jewish actuary suspects his cat of cheating on him with his Protestant girlfriend.
In the collection, humor complements pathos. Readers will recognize themselves in these stories and in protagonists whose backgrounds are vastly different than their own—we’ve all been outsiders at some point.
“These stories spoke to me,” says Deb. “They feature these incredibly human characters whose challenges and obstacles are interlaced with a humor that just makes you want to keep reading.”
R.L. Maizes is at work on a novel, which will be published by Celadon in 2020. Born and raised in Queens, NY, she now lives in Boulder, CO. Maizes’s short stories have aired on National Public Radio have appeared in the literary magazines Electric Literature, Witness, Bellevue Literary Review, Slice, and Blackbird, among others. Her essays have been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Lilith, and elsewhere. Maizes is an alumna of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Tin House Summer Writer’s Workshop. Her work has received Honorable Mention in Glimmer Train’s Fiction Open contest, has been a finalist in numerous other national contests, and has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize.
WE LOVE ANDERSON COOPER is coming spring of 2019.