Books

“Ms. Gammon, who publishes her fiction with very small presses, deserves to be more widely read…. These stories portray the suffering caused by desire without censure or sentimentality, in a way that might be Zen detachment or might simply be called wisdom.” — Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal, February 7, 2024

Each title below is linked for further detail

The Gunman and the Carnival

“In The Gunman and the Carnival, Catherine Gammon mirrors the brightly fractured nature of our lives at the sharp edge of this American moment. Her characters are recognizable in their striving for human connection in our time of despair and isolation—and in their struggle for footing upon a sinking landscape. Stylistically limber and by turns meditative, restless, and moving, these stories bravely attempt to channel what it means to be alive in this world now, and now, and now.” —Lauren Acampora, author of The Hundred Waters

The Martyrs, The Lovers

“Read this book! and be seduced by Catherine Gammon’s stunning and complex political mystery of a martyr bearing witness in a dangerous world. Against a backdrop of America’s and Germany’s brutal histories, her lyrical yet frightening then haunted and intimate language crawls into the psyche of her characters. Gammon is an author whose books you can trust to shock and seduce. Brava for a new book—for our times.” — Margo Berdeshevsky, author of It Is Still Beautiful to Hear the Heart Beat, Beautiful Soon Enough, and Kneel Said the Night

China Blue

Winner of the Bridge Eight Press Fiction Prize

“Catherine Gammon’s kaleidoscopic and complex novel China Blue is both gorgeously and fluidly written and immovably fixed by the boundaries of human suffering. Taking place in the shadow of the Vietnam War and during the American destabilization of El Salvador, China Blue assembles its montage from the jagged lives of women and men entrapped by addiction, poverty, and sexual obsession. Gritty, sorrowful, clear-eyed, and vivid, China Blue is a powerful book, and one of uncompromising originality and integrity.” — Lynn Emanuel, author of The Nerve of It, Noose and Hook, and Then, Suddenly

Sorrow

“…a devastating, gorgeous, impossible, unstoppable book…” — V (formerly Eve Ensler)

Isabel Out of the Rain

“What Samuel Beckett achieves in so many of his works through the exploration of ‘absence,’ Catherine Gammon in Isabel Out of the Rain also achieves but through presence, accumulation, excess. I am always suspicious when someone describes a work as poetic, always wondering why then the work isn’t a poem. Gammon manages to be poetic, while never sacrificing the story at the center of Isabel’s (and thus the reader’s) voyage from out of the rain, into safety, and back out into a changed world.” —Rane Arroyo, The Pennsylvania Review, vol. 6 no. 1, 1994

Beauty and the Beast

Fiction from the 1970s, early stories of loss and obsession, voices from another century, another planet, voices exploring themselves, both innocent and haunted, a time capsule, message in a bottle from a forgotten present, memory of the future. Or simply a collection of stories, an old collection, early successes and failures, the young writer this older writer used to be.