Gathered Here Together
Gathered here together are 22 of Garrett Socol’s finely-crafted stories, by turns darkly humorous and light and zany, and often both at once. The characters populating these stories march slightly out-of-step with the world around them: a dentist, his hygienist, and their illicit flossing , a writer who publishes her own suicide handbook, a woman selling baked goods for electroshock therapy. In this collection, Socol brings his wry insight and sensitivity to bear on the madness of contemporary culture, the silliness of everyday life, and illustrates the many ways people, against all odds, keep themselves afloat.
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Connie Martinson Talks Books
Praise for Gathered Here Together
"Death, suicide, and dental work have never been this funny. Garrett Socol creates characters on the edge--often with one foot in the great beyond--and finds their humanity and quirky appeal, writing about them with devastatingly witty bemusement. His stories are a great reason to stay alive."
-- Michael Musto, The Village Voice
"Brilliantly created characters and masterful prose. There's no fluff here. Just finely crafted fiction that brings in the reader and doesn't let go until well after the last story is told."
-- Nathaniel Tower, Bartleby Snopes
"Garrett Socol looks benignly on our mucky world and conveys the dark humour of everyday madness."
-- Val Stevenson, Nth Position
GARRETT SOCOL, a native New Yorker, currently resides in Los Angeles. His first life was lived as Gary Socol, and he was a television producer. Gary created and produced “Talk Soup” (host, Greg Kinnear) and “The Gossip Show” among other series for E!. The specials he wrote and produced were hosted by Joan Collins, Jenny McCarthy, Jerry Springer, Molly Ringwald & Ally Sheedy, Carnie Wilson, Pamela Anderson, Jaime Pressly, Tori Spelling and others. His first play The Shadow of Greatness premiered at the Berkshire Theatre Festival in 2000 in a production that starred Richard Chamberlain. His second play, Bicoastal Woman, enjoyed a successful run at the Pasadena Playhouse.
His second life began in 2007 when he left television and began writing fiction. His short stories have been published in dozens of literary journals including PANK, Perigee, Pear Noir, The Barcelona Review, The Dublin Quarterly, Underground Voices, > kill author, 3:AM Magazine, Hobart, Drunken Boat, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.
