John Holman Selected Works

Triangle Ray is a collection of short stories linked by the character of Ray Fielding, introduced first as a young black man coming of age in the 1980s and infatuated with his schoolmate, Marie. Against the wishes of their families, the two marry just out of high school, but the marriage falls apart within a few years as time makes them strangers to each other.

Twenty years later, Ray is unmarried and still searching for a lasting romance, especially with Alma, whom he meets at the hotel where he works. Through his interactions with Marie, Alma, and others, Ray explores the motives behind the ways we retell our stories, and how we ignore or embrace the future that is already taking shape in the present.

A keen observer of social factors and class disparity, John Holman writes with sharp prose and startling insight, and employs diverse form and point of view to examine issues of race and class within the context of Ray’s romantic aspirations.

An episodic novel set somewhere in the New South, Luminous Mysteries traces the lives of Grim Power and his sister, Rita, from their youth to early middle age. In powerful prose that has been compared to that of his writing mentor, Raymond Carver, Holman tellingly paints a portrait of the lives of middle-class African Americans today. Grim, who worked as a race-car driver and a show-business cowboy before returning home to run a car restoration business, and Rita, a math teacher, are enriched by their friends, their family, and the small beautiful moments of everyday life. In penetrating language Holman exposes the uniqueness of each person's soul that always lies just beneath a quotidian surface.

In his remarkable debut collection, John Holman probes the slightly surreal lives of blacks in the New South. Although his polished and restrained prose recalls Raymond Carver and Frederick Barthelme, with whom he studied, the coolness of Holman's approach only heightens the untoward possibilities simmering in the situations about which he writes. Holman has devised a mixture designed to startle—subtly.

Amid the banality and strangeness of their lives, Holman's men and women reach out for personal connections, dodging and challenging the obstacles. Humor and language are their only weapons. Hence the title: for here, too, is a world where they speak squabble—a tongue both passing strange and strangely familiar. Squabble introduces a fresh and arresting voice to American letters which is sure to make itself heard.