Writer

Order the Essay Collection: https://www.autofocuslit.com/store/p/the-body-is-a?fbclid=IwAR03QilNJ2tuezAdAt3MQV5GC3oG0iASXdU-QLpL2zdSJ_H1naUkqcBu5nQ_aem_AUxsSMfDzZ4RDVvwGYKgFcp746FF4O_BGQSj6psuAc646A9oWF1ncsKivKKmOEfZ2dq81dsE01pyssnFUkXcuVD4

Order the short story collection from the press: https://www.uapress.com/product/one-person-away-from-you/

 “The essays in this beautiful book are not only elegant meditations on parenthood, marriage, and the passage of time; they are celebrations of the simple pleasures of life—a first kiss, a quiet morning coffee, the way light fills a room. I was profoundly moved by this collection and by Bertaina’s graceful and unflinchingly honest prose. Here is a writer unafraid to make himself vulnerable on the page, and the result are essays that resonate with authenticity and insight.”
—Andrew Porter, author of The Disappeared 

 “In The Body Is A Temporary Gathering Place, Andrew Bertaina indulges his ‘near erotic delight’ in digression to bring us a book of quietly transcendent essays. God, cows, trains, ex-lovers, the Bermuda Triangle, 80s movies, the philosophers of ancient Greece, fatherhood, the writing life—it’s all here, the world, in its enormity and specificity. To read these essays is akin to awakening in a train’s sleeping car and looking out at a landscape that overnight has indelibly changed. Who am I now? you ask, turning a page. Who have I been?”
—Steve Edwards, author of Breaking Into the Backcountry 

 “Andrew Bertaina is a fantastically talented writer, and the stories in One Person Away From You are endlessly inventive, formally surprising, and as funny as they are moving. Prepare to be overwhelmed by Bertaina’s endless imagination, which offers nothing less than excess and delight on every page.” 
—Matt Bell, author of Appleseed

“Each story in Andrew Bertaina’s One Person Away From You is a shimmering monument to the lies we tell ourselves to get through the day. Seeing our own lies unfold on the page, the reader glimpses a world where we do not merely live and die alone, which might be Bertaina’s greatest trick. His stories are that blend of invasive and cathartic that only seems to exist in worthy short fiction. Beautiful, somber, heartbreaking life in motion.
—Seth Borgen, author of If I Die in Ohio

“With an enormous generosity of spirit crossing epochs of history, Andrew Bertaina’s One Person Away From You offers prose poems, flash fictions, journalistic parodies, and fabulist histories that often begin with some premise or conceit from a known form, which they deflect or redirect, ingeniously insisting in subtle ways, “this isn’t one of those stories.” In one piece, a writer’s new partner transforms a novel that was written before they met; in another an ancient map creates its own sea, in worlds where it’s the imagination proves the determinant of experience, rather than the reverse.  Masterful pieces include ‘A Translator’s Note,’ ‘A Preface to the Third Edition’, ‘Winter in the City’, and ‘Maybe This Time’. Bertaina’s work continues in the tradition of Hemingway’s ‘A Very Short Story’ from In Our Time, but with a fabulist lens, and with a contemporary edge that incorporates Tinder, middle class life, Cosmopolitan, and the movies into the fairy tale. I am so moved by this work, its intelligence and range, which is rivaled only by the tenderness and poignancy of the writing.” 
—David Keplinger, author of The World to Come

“One Person Away From You asks the big questions: of life and death, love and loss, God and nothingness. Bertaina writes with the mind of a philosopher and the soul of a poet. These stories are intimate, expansive, and wondrous.”
—Jennifer Wortman, author of This. This. This. Is. Love. Love. Love. 

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