Geoffrey Becker's Dangerous Men was selected by Charles Baxter as the winner of the fifteenth annual Drue Heinz Literature Prize. His manuscript was selected from nearly three hundred submitted by published writers.In these tightly drafted stories, Becker creates a wide variety of distinct voices, peculiar characters, and odd stettings, with tantalizing emphasis on lonliness, loss, and the ever-present struggle to find one's place in the world. "It was wrong to think that our presence would linger on, though it was to this notion that I realized I'd been grasping all along," the music-student narrator of "Dangerous Men" says after an evening involving drugs, a fight, and a car accident, "the idea that in some way we were etching ourselves onto the air, leaving shadows that would remain forever."Many of the pieces incorporate music into the storyline. Music is a gathering point in his characters' misfit lives. In "Magister Ludi," a seventeen-year-old girl meets up...

Vibrant, sexy, and quite possibly crazy, Bernice is determined to reclaim the child she gave up for adoption five years ago. She convinces her boyfriend, Landis, to help carry out her plan, but once the abduction is accomplished, Bernice—whose own mother was given to manic episodes and strange behavior—is plagued with doubts. Will Landis stay with her, given her volatile personality and his own drifter past? Will she and Landis both end up in jail for this crime? And, perhaps most importantly, will she fail at being a mother? Dovetailed with this is the story of the conservative Christian adoptive parents, Tessa and David, and the effect the kidnapping has on their troubled marriage. As Bernice and Landis journey across America, from Colorado Springs to Tucson to Baltimore, Bernice must confront her past and the secrets she has kept.From Publishers WeeklyStarred Review. In his incisive latest, Becker (2008 Flannery O'Conner Prize–winner for Black Elvis) recounts the misadventures of Bernice Click, a volatile young woman determined to raise the biological daughter she gave up for adoption. With the help of her boyfriend, Bernice kidnaps five-year-old Emily from her adoptive parents in Colorado and ends up in Baltimore, where she attempts to make a new life for herself and the girl. Meanwhile, Tessa Harding, Emily's adoptive mother, tries to recover Emily without involving authorities. Struggling with the revelation of her husband's indifference to the child, not to mention his adultery and increasingly sadistic behavior, Tessa embarks on a riveting adventure. The novel relies on a far-fetched coincidence to launch Tessa's mission, but resulting scenes are sufficiently tense and thought provoking to justify the stretch, while Becker's portrayal of Tessa's faith is moving and psychologically complex. As desperation mounts on all sides, Becker piles on devastating events, creating a remarkably taut narrative and a rousing testament to humanity's capacity for resilience. Nobody gets off the hook, though they do find uneasy deliverance in unexpected places. (Feb.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Review"Geoffrey Becker's fantastic Hot Springs works hard to conceal its own scope and ambition, but the book's coyness (not to mention its humor) only heightens the uncanny, moving power of the question at its core: When it comes down to it, how far will people go for love?...Throughout the novel, characters ignore their own better judgments, creating a thrilling psychological drama that unfolds alongside the external events and creates space for the unexpected on virtually ever page. Becker has a gift for surprises...Becker's technical expertise and natural storytelling gifts are difficult to deny, as is his admirably muted sense of the absurd...Of all the reasons to be excited about Hot Springs, though, the book's strange and fresh treatment of love itself is the best...it's a taut meditation on letting go and a convincing reminder that love, for all the destruction it can cause, can usually rebuild just about anything."—Patrick Somerville, The New York Times Book Review"In his incisive latest, Becker (2008 Flannery O'Conner Prize–winner for Black Elvis) recounts the misadventures of Bernice Click, a volatile young woman determined to raise the biological daughter she gave up for adoption. With the help of her boyfriend, Bernice kidnaps five-year-old Emily from her adoptive parents in Colorado and ends up in Baltimore, where she attempts to make a new life for herself and the girl. Meanwhile, Tessa Harding, Emily's adoptive mother, tries to recover Emily without involving authorities. Struggling with the revelation of her husband's indifference to the child, not to mention his adultery and increasingly sadistic behavior, Tessa embarks on a riveting adventure. The novel relies on a far-fetched coincidence to launch Tessa's mission, but resulting scenes are sufficiently tense and thought provoking to justify the stretch, while Becker's portrayal of Tessa's faith is moving and psychologically complex. As desperation mounts on all sides, Becker piles on devastating events, creating a remarkably taut narrative and a rousing testament to humanity's capacity for resilience. Nobody gets off the hook, though they do find uneasy deliverance in unexpected places."—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review"In Hot Springs, his rollicking new novel, Geoffrey Becker has assembled a delicate collage of damaged souls...Becker gives them to us with such earnest and empathetic insight that he makes us root for even the most ungracious among them."—Rachel Rosenblit, ELLE"The dichotomy of Bernice and Landis is the sort of thing that makes for great fiction..."—Time Out Chicago"Geoffrey Becker gets you in fast and deep to the humor and the danger of the situation." —latimes.com"Becker's skills as a writer grow increasingly apparent as he lures readers into understanding and empathizing with each of the book's characters despite their flaws and misdeeds."—Colorado Springs Independent"Becker also balances Hot Springs’ momentum with keen insights, creating a terrific tension between the characters’ hunt for faith and redemption and their more profane cravings."—The Rumpus.net"'Bernice was ten when her mother walked around the block naked,' Becker starts out, neatly drawing the reader into a world where the division between normal and crazy is razor thin."—The Oregonian"Becker is a phenomenal storyteller; only a writer of his caliber could have pulled this off so well."—Sacramento Book Review"As the plot unfolds, readers are inexorably drawn into the narrative and are compelled to keep reading to learn the ultimate outcome...Becker demonstrates great skill in depicting distasteful characters whose unhappy experiences are so morbidly fascinating and so bloated with perplexing uncertainty as to provide their own uniquely tainted attraction." —Morton I. Teicher, ForeWord"You won’t trust a person in this book but it’s hard to look away. Peoplemay be feckless and unreliable in the big ways, but their longing forchildren drives them without relent. Hot Springs is a road trip layeredwith desire and mistake and the impossibility of keeping a secret fromrising through the years." —Ron Carlson, author of The Signal"Like the first dip into the searing mineral soup for which the book is named, the first pages of Hot Springs shock and lure...Ultimately, Hot Springs is a beautifully crafted novel with a tightly woven yet unconventional storyline...the characters shape and propel the plot, yet eventually, that plot allows for the full development of the characters themselves." —Christy Corp-Minamiji, Blogcritics.com

In this funny, touching collection about music, identity, liars, and love, Geoffrey Becker brings us into the lives of people who have come to a turning point and lets us watch as they take, however clumsily, their next steps.In the title story, an aging black singer who performs only Elvis songs despite his classic bluesman looks, has his regular spot at the local blues jam threatened by a newly arrived Asian American with the unlikely name Robert Johnson. In "Man Under," two friends struggling to be rock musicians in Reagan-era Brooklyn find that their front door has been removed by their landlord. An aspiring writer discovers the afterlife consists of being the stand in for a famous author on an endless book tour in "Another Coyote Story." Lonely and adrift in Florence, Italy, a young man poses as a tour guide with an art history degree in "Know Your Saints." And in "This Is Not a Bar," a simple night on the town for a middle-aged guitar student and jazz buff turns into a confrontation with his past and an exploration of what is or is not real.In his depictions of struggling performers, artists, expectant parents, travelers, con-men, temporarily employed academics, and even the recently deceased, Becker asks the question, Which are more important: the stories we tell other people or the ones we tell ourselves?From Publishers WeeklyIn twelve tightly-coiled stories, Becker (Dangerous Men, Bluestown) mines the thwarted dreams, failed relationships, and wayward lives of chronically luckless characters. The award-winning title story is a good introduction to Becker's work, featuring his recurring muse: the down-and-out musician, in this case an African-American Elvis impersonator upstaged by a Chinese Robert Johnson. "Another Coyote Story" is narrated by a Native-American writer living in Sherman Alexie's literary shadow. In "Jimi Hendrix, Blue Grass Star," a street musician fakes a brain tumor in an effort to woo a beautiful but cold violinist. In "Santorini," middle-aged and recently-dumped Laura makes a play for her best friend's much, much younger son. The cumulative effect of these stories is disheartening; protagonists always end up worse off than they were at the story's start. The rewards Becker offers readers take the form of wry humor and the occasional lapse into grace, alongside the more immediate pleasures of "cigarette and pork grease smell, of cold beers and loud music." Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Review"Black Elvis addresses the most potent of the bittersweet mysteries, herein writ right, that animate our condemned kind: family, loyalty, religion, memory and love. If there were a short story Hall of Fame, Geoffrey Becker would be installed in its rotunda--on the Jumbotron, in fact, keyboard held aloft in much-deserved triumph." --Lee K. Abbott, author of All Things, All at Once: New and Selected Stories"These are wonderful stories, both humorous and deadly serious, and sometimes with a touch of magic as well. If you think you don't know these characters--in all their variations--you surely will before you are halfway through a page." --Elizabeth Strout, author of Olive Kitteridge"Many of the characters in this collection are journeyman musicians--has-beens and never-weres--but make no mistake, Geoffrey Becker is no journeyman himself. He is an artist of the highest order. Without flourish or pretension, Becker delivers these sparkling stories with conviction, verve, and perfect pitch." --Don Lee, author of Wrack and Ruin