Winner of FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize

A grand tour of the edges of our lives, where glory and significance riot against the logic of living and the pall of tragedy.

The Making Sense of Things is a collection of twelve stories that pulse with memory, magic, and myth—all our favorite ways of trying to make sense of things.

Readers are treated to vivid and unforgettable characters. A fiercely independent woman puts the man who loves her to unconscionable tests, never guessing that arson, suicide, and canine obesity will yield a magical kind of happiness. A honeymooner in Venice, addled by fever and second thoughts, commits by dumb error a double murder. A brisk lawyer founders when a car wreck claims his son and ex-wife, then discovers that the desperation of grief is a kind of hope.

George Choundas is a former FBI agent, winner of the New Millennium Fiction Prize, and two-time Pushcart Prize nominee with work in over fifty publications, including The Best Small Fictions 2015. His fiction has been shortlisted for the Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose, the St. Lawrence Book Award for Fiction, and the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction.

“Reading George Choundas is a bit like watching an archer casually shoot an arrow, hit the bullseye, then draw a second, finer arrow from his quiver and split the first arrow in half. One gets the sense he could do it forever, firing arrow after arrow into the exact center of the heart of the matter. This collection is staggering and brilliant and might have made me a better writer but definitely made me a better person.”
—Charles Yu, author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

“You want to read this book because you have never before read a book like this one. Inventive, humorous, dark, yes, but also continually outstripping our responses. Choundas may be a genius or someone with something up his sleeve, or both. What’s important is that he gives us twelve fabulous and brilliant stories. The sentences run almost amok on purpose. These stories will open your eyes even wider.”
—Kelly Cherry, whose newest book is Temporium: Fictions

“These stories are wildly touching, funny in really funny ways, but also flights of mind, image, fantasy, and language telling us that reality is as malleable as love and as changeable as a fire in a forest.”
—G.K. Wuori, author of HoneyLee’s Girl