Kevin P. Keating: Fiction, Essays & Commentary

From the November 15, 2013 edition of  Publishers Weekly : Last fall, Timothy O’Connell, an editor at Vintage, noticed a starred PW review of The Natural Order of Things by Kevin P. Keating. In February he learned that the novel, at the time available via print-on-demand from Aqueous Books, had been nominated for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. By then, his interest was really piqued and, by coincidence, an opportunity to acquire the paperback rights landed on his desk shortly thereafter. David Patterson, an agent at Foundry, submitted the book in early March alongside Keating’s next novel, Captive Condition. During the first week of April, O’Connell secured a two-book deal at auction for paperback rights to The Natural Order of Things and rights for all formats for The Captive Condition . Vintage released an e-book of The Natural Order of Things in advance of the L.A. Times awards to put some version on the market in the event...

From Cleveland Scene : For more than one hundred years, the Jesuit school has been regarded by its students, administrators, and staff as a beacon of uncompromising moral standards, an important symbol of Catholic piety located at the center of a labyrinth of winding boulevards, blind alleys, and crumbling brick lanes; streets that seem to twist and turn and double back on themselves so that even the slavering packs of stray dogs, the most intuitive of cartographers, have great difficulty navigating the chaos of slate sidewalks as they scrounge for rancid gobbets before vanishing like ghosts into the dripping cellars of abandoned houses; a once picturesque quarter of the city now overrun by liquor stores, empty factories, and a small cheerless café that has garnered notoriety as a literary demimonde where uninspired poets squabble with the barista over the price of a cup of coffee; "the old neighborhood" as it is sometimes called—old because the Gilded Age mansions a...

The Quivering Pen : From Culver City in the northeast to Venice Beach in the southwest, the immense concrete slab of Venice Boulevard runs diagonally through some of the least scenic terrain in all of Los Angeles, passing under Interstate 405 and bisecting the Mar Vista neighborhood until it reaches, after seven interminable treeless miles, the freakiest beach in North America where middle-aged men wearing floral pattern Speedos do drug-induced dances on the boardwalk with their 1980s boomboxes pressed to their ears and where thickly muscled acrobats hopping around on pogo sticks mesmerize large crowds of weekend sun-worshipers.   As I boarded the number 33 bus near Culver City I asked the driver, “How long does it take to get to the beach from here?”  The driver was strangely evasive.   “Uh…maybe…oh…twenty minutes or so,” he said, and I knew he was lying.  “Really?  But it’s only seven miles away.”  Standing behind me, swaying back and fort...

From Salon :  As a native of Cleveland, I’ve been fascinated, on the one hand, by the city’s desperate, dystopian “Mad Max” hellscape of shuttered warehouses, gruesome rendering plants and rusted iron ore unloaders. It’s a world that still echoes dimly with the cacophonous clanging of ancient machinery and the inferno roar of steel foundries and blast furnaces. On the other hand, there’s the shining modern metropolis that boasts of having one of the world’s great orchestras, a renowned art museum and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  These disparate worlds can be viewed simultaneously from the observation deck of a building with the inauspicious name Terminal Tower. While many non-residents are aware that the Cuyahoga, that  most notorious of all rivers,  vivisects the city into two roughly equal parts — the east and west sides — they may not know that the city is also divided to a certain degree into north and south by Interstate 90. On the north side...

The Natural Order of Things Comprised of 15 interconnected stories,  The Natural Order of Things ,  is properly thought of as a novel in the tradition of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio  or John Steinbeck's  The Pastures of Heaven  ― but with a gothic sensibility. The novel concerns the adventures and exploits of a small group of students, teachers, employees, and priests at a Jesuit prep school in a dying industrial city. Its stories harbor star quarterbacks who sabotage important games, the head coach with a gambling addiction wagering on his own team, an elderly priest suffering from acute memory loss who dabbles in heretical beliefs, and others who swim against the tides of society's proscribed roles.  "The Black Death of Gentile da Foligno" was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by author Thomas E. Kennedy. Another story, "Uncreated Creatures," was nominated for a StorySouth Million Writers Award by the editor of ...