first published in Misfit Magazine, Editor Alan Catlin
Nicholas Claro, This Is Where You Are, Roadside Press, www.roadsidefam.com distributed by www.magicaljeep.com, 2025, 155 pages, $18
Claro’s first book comes burdened with a blurb , “reminiscent of Raymond Carver’s classic story collections” and “In the tradition of Carver and Dubus.” I say burdened as those two guys are the masters of the hard-nosed, gritty realism that dominated the short fiction scene in the closing decades of 1900’s. Fortunately, Claro is up to the task of replicating the master’s work with equally as vivid, ordinary people usually in the late stage of a disintegrating relationship. As I read these, basically read the collection straight through, I kept thinking oh, yeah, Carver. There are going nowhere marriages, losers, drinkers, shattered families unable to cope with life-altering emergencies, heinous neighbor’s wearing A2 t-shirts and owning 14 (count them) raucous dogs who never, ever stop barking. Even the brief, one is only a single paragraph, pieces are effective and well appointed. Realism in fiction is alive and well and Nichloas Claro belongs in the forefront of the next wave of short fiction writers of note.
—Alan Catlin, author of The Work Anxiety Poems and others
