Wallow

Have you ever thought about quitting your job, leaving it all behind, running away to Europe, to find yourself? Ever been to Prague and considered, just for a second, what it would be like to stay? WALLOW depicts the plight of Steve, a self-obsessed romantic in the self-induced exile of Prague's expat community. Newly divorced from both the love of his life and his yuppie-dom on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Steve finds himself broke, alone, and smack dab in the middle of his quarter-life crisis. To get through it, he is going to have to give up a few of his favorite delusions. Before he does, Steve takes a moment to bask in the cold sun of Self.WARNING: Includes episodes of profanity and sexually explicit language.Rick Pryll's fiction is at once a thin disguise for his personal experience and a deep, dark tour of his secret self. Earnest to a fault, his work triumphs in its ability to crystallize the emotional complexity of an instant in individual human experience. Highlights:The short story "Chris" captures what it was like to be living in the American expatriate community in Prague at the close of the last century. The poem "Paper Plates" nails what it is about living in a transient yet sticky place like Prague that hurts so much. The short story "Eye of the Jackal" features an ironical twist that exposes the victim of a theft as a thief himself. And finally, an Unsent Letter at the end of the book (dated to show that it was written before any of the rest of the book occurred) shows that while the process of self-discovery is bumpy and long, often the kernel of it exists within us before we even begin. This connected collection of short stories, poems, unsent letters and journal excerpts come together to describe a twenty-something man's coming to terms with his life after divorce. Set both in New York City and Prague, the book is divided into seven sections, taking the reader through a fractured landscape of loss, self-pity, self-discovery and ultimately hope.