Kevin P. Keating: Fiction, Essays & Commentary

From the February 2023 edition of Belle Ombre : One week after the fire claimed her grown son and English setter, her horses and wagons, her rifles and ledgers, her personal library, her precisely calibrated lab instruments and voluminous notebooks in which she’d recorded her secret chemical formulae, Hilda Whitby stood with her back to the riverbank and surveyed for a final time the scorched two-acre parcel where the house, barn, and lumber mill once stood. Despite the warm weather, she wore a heavy cotton dress that reached to her ankles, one of the few garments that had survived the explosion and the one she wore to the funeral held in the Methodist churchyard overlooking the valley. To a leather leg strap under her skirt, she fastened a dissection knife salvaged from the smoldering pile of debris that once served as her private laboratory. The seven-inch blade might prove useful should she happen upon one of the desperate highwaymen known to roam the locks after sundown. While the ...

From the February 27th edition of Litro Magazine :   Except for a confusing and ultimately consequential semester her junior year in college when she abruptly withdrew from her accounting and finance classes and enrolled in Fundamentals of Classical Music, Amalie had always considered herself a conscientious, practical-minded woman whose interest in music extended no further than listening to Top 40 radio during her morning commute to the office. The only reason she enrolled in the class at all was because she had a crush on the cute graduate student teaching it. Said to be a wunderkind who was destined to become a great composer of film scores, the next Erich Wolfgang Korngold or Bernard Herrmann, he sat hunched over a baby grand piano while delivering lectures on Ennio Morricone and his beloved John Williams.  READ THE ENTIRE STORY HERE

  After working as a boilermaker in the steel mills in Ohio, KEVIN P. KEATING became a professor of English and began teaching at Baldwin Wallace University, Cleveland State University, and Lorain County Community College. His essays and stories have appeared in more than fifty literary journals, and his first novel,   The Natural Order of Things ,  was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes’ Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. His second novel,  The Captive Condition ,  will be released by Pantheon Books in July of 2015. He lives in Cleveland. VISIT PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE AUTHOR'S PAGE