Clifford Garstang

Clifford Garstang is the co-founder and former managing editor of Prime Number Magazine. He is the author of the Press 53 story collections House of the Ancients and Other Stories; In an Uncharted Country; and What the Zhang Boys Know: A Novel in Stories, winner of the Library of Virginia Award for Fiction. He is also the editor of the three-volume anthology series from Press 53, Everywhere Stories: Short Fiction from a Small Planet, and the author of the novels, The Shaman of Turtle Valley (Braddock Avenue Books) and Oliver’s Travels (Regal House). He holds a BA in Philosophy from Northwestern University, an MA in English and a JD from Indiana University, an MPA from Harvard University, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Queens University of Charlotte. His work has appeared in numerous literary magazines, including Bellevue Literary Review, Blackbird, The Hopkins Review, Cream City Review, and Whitefish Review. His book reviews have appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, Rain Taxi, Washington Independent Review of Books, and elsewhere.

Impeccably written, sumptuously imagined, and completely enchanting. —Tim O’Brien

Clifford Garstang as editor

Praise for House of the Ancients

In his story collection House of the Ancients, Clifford Garstang sets before the reader a tiered Crayola box full of modern American males. A variety of different shades await inside—troubled, thoughtful, arrogant, and broken men, each trying to find his place in a changing society. Be prepared to hate some of them. Be prepared to weep for some of them. Be prepared to weep for the ones you hate. Fascinating, insightful, equal parts poignant and disturbing, House of the Ancients will keep you reading deep into the lonely night.

—Kim Wright, author of Last Ride to Graceland, winner of the Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction

Clifford Garstang’s impressive collection arrives like a rush of postcards from around the world, streaming in through the morning mail slot. Mexico City, Bangkok, Hanoi, Copenhagen, Central Asia and the hinterlands of Virginia are only a few of the locales he transports us to in these memorable stories. And at each stop along the way, we’re greeted by another cast of characters, eager to enchant, charm and delight.

—Tim Wendel, award-winning author of Castro’s Curveball and Cancer Crossings

The characters in Clifford Garstang's House of the Ancients and Other Stories travel the world. But no matter how far they go—Denmark, Mexico, Vietnam—they can't escape themselves. It is the collection's flawed and fascinating characters as much as Garstang's exquisite evocations of international settings that make House of the Ancients a wonderful reading experience.

—Mark Brazaitis, author of The Incurables and The River of Lost Voices: Stories from Guatemala

Where won’t Clifford Garstang travel in his urgent quest to explore the darker corners of the male mind? These incisive, pitch-perfect short stories sweep through a dazzling realm of exotic locales, pushing the reader into an uncomfortable and daring consideration of culpability.

—Leslie Pietrzyk, author of Silver Girl and This Angel on My Chest

Praise for What the Zhang Boys Know

“A widower, a sculptor, a minor poet, an interior designer, and a painter are just a few of Clifford Garstang’s affecting characters, residents of Nanking Mansion, the setting for these deeply satisfying, life-affirming stories linked by neighborliness in a ‘not-quite-gentrified’ neighborhood.  Garstang’s characters strive to transcend ‘the deep quiet of absence’ in the wake of all manner of devastations. They leave their doors unlocked, they console, they make room, they share what they have made of sorrow, so proving, as do these stories, the solace to be found in art.” 

—Christine Schutt, author of National Book Award-finalist Florida, and Pulitzer Prize-finalist All Souls

“What the Zhang Boys Know has a dozen chapters, each one a vivid short story in itself. Garstang makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts. The lives of the inhabitants of a condominium in Washington, D.C.'s Chinatown are told separately and as part of a web of entanglements. The entrances and exits are handled with the deftness of a French comedy, but the empathy of the author brings all the characters achingly alive. What the Zhang Boys Know is a wonderful and haunting book.”

—John Casey, author of Compass Rose and Spartina, winner of the National Book Award

“Clifford Garstang presents one of the more memorable settings I've seen in any book, Nanking Mansion, a renovated tenement in D.C.'s Chinatown, filled with characters whose stories are more fantastic than they first appear. In prose that is measured and confident, he carefully works to show us how these characters' grief and loneliness becomes unified by their collective setting to transform into something utterly beautiful and unforgettable. What a world Garstang has built for us, and how grateful I was to discover it.”

—Kevin Wilson, author of Tunneling to the Center of the Earth and NYT Bestseller The Family Fang

“In the tradition of the best volumes of linked stories, from Susan Minot's Monkeys and Rand Cooper's The Last to Go to David Schickler's Kissing in Manhattan, Clifford Garstang's What the Zhang Boys Know traces a graceful arc, as the meanings and moments in the stories accrue. Garstang's inventive and original writing, a beguiling invitation to myriad subplots and destinations, offers what every reader desires: a lucid and satisfying experience of literature.”

—Katharine Weber, author of Triangle, True Confections, The Memory Of All That

“The Nanking Mansion is the Winesburg,Ohio of the 21st century and What the Zhang Boys Know is Garstang's powerfully moving take on place, time, love, and what happens when strangers in a strange land pick community over difference. These stories wrap around one another, and the reader, in a big, warm, bracing human hug.”

—Patrick Somerville, author of This Bright River and The Cradle

Praise for In an Uncharted Country

"This collection delivers on its title: each story takes us into an area—emotional and geographic—that we may not have been before. There is an impressive variety here, and Garstang's ability as a storyteller is on display each time. These characters are real, vulnerable, and always, in unique ways, brave."

—Elizabeth Strout, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Olive Kitteridge

"In an Uncharted Country is an impeccably written, sumptuously imagined, and completely enchanting book of stories, each with its own high ambitions, each successful both as prose and as story. Clifford Garstang is the real thing—a writer loaded with talent. And this book is a reminder of the delightful miracles a good story can perform in a reader's heart."

—Tim O’Brien, National Book Award-winning author of Going After Cacciato

“In An Uncharted Country is a subtly braided collection of spare, taut stories that conjures a community and a way of life with respect, affection and intimacy. Clifford Garstang often captures his characters at sharp moments of loss, but it is their dogged perseverance in the face of those losses that make these figures move us.”

—Peter Ho Davies, author of The Welsh Girl and winner of the 2008 PEN/Malamud Award for Short Fiction

“Read Garstang for his handle on craft, his ability to imply. Read the book because it’s a navigational tool. With clear-eyed precision, it maps the unseen: It draws out how we locate ourselves in a world of knotty relations and turbulent climates. It accesses the unreachable parts of an identity. It grants sight of others’ private days. In a sense, the book trespasses for us, enters an off-limits site. Follow it.”

—Janelle Adsit, Mid-American Review