Esquire Ball, Stories from the Great Black Swamp

These linked stories draw readers into the rugged, mythic landscape of Northwest Ohio, into lives defined by crime and consequence. Lisa Slage Robinson writes the human condition with terrific sensitivity and surprise. Esquire Ball is a marvel.

– Laura van den Berg, author of State of Paradise

Toledo, Ohio takes on a dark, mythic quality in this fantastic debut collection by Lisa Slage Robinson. She pries open, sludges through, dresses up and dresses down the complex lives of her characters living in what was once the Great Black Swamp. I can’t say enough good things about this fabulous fabulist collection. Here is a writer moonwalking through the shoulder-padded minefield of the 1980s with wit and grace.

–Sherrie Flick, author of I Have Not Considered Consequences

Lisa Slage Robinson’s Esquire Ball is rooted vividly and brilliantly in a particular place but veined through with human universals: avarice and exultation, meanness and passion, lust and love and rage. There’s a realism in these stories that has both breadth and depth, and there are slides into the strange that happen suddenly yet entirely logically; in every register this collection thrums with life. I loved it with my whole heart and my whole mind.

-Clare Beams, author of The Garden

Who wouldn’t keep reading a story that began “Trevor needed a wife?” Lisa Slage Robinson has a great gift for making readers care about her characters; we want what they want; we dread what they dread. And she is an expert in bad behaviour. Many of her women are not as nice as they seem. Esquire Ball, Stories from the Great Swamp is a dazzling and irresistible collection.

-Margot Livesey, author of The Road from Belhaven

In Esquire Ball: Stories from the Great Black Swamp, Lisa Slage Robinson spins a set of stories that are not just linked but entangled: a sister blessed and saddled with a darling brother dumped on her doorstep by her absentee father; a lawyer who finds himself trying to con his colleagues to aide an ailing widow and her unofficial granddaughter; a young man on the verge of professional success who takes to the swamps to replace the fiancée who abandoned him. Though many of the stories take place in courtrooms and law offices, these are characters who are at heart lawless, irrepressible, who resist the world’s efforts and even their own desperate desires to become respectable and instead lead the reader through twisted, intriguing paths.

-Anjali Sachdeva author of All the Names they Used for God