Alexander Shalom Joseph’s American Wasteland is a collection of stories about the contemporary day-to-day in America. It is said in the Talmud that one job of certain Jews is to justify the existence of humanity to God; in this collection, Joseph attempts to do just this with his stories, which speak to the everyday mundane and the vast richness in both meaning and meaninglessness that abound all around us. In one story a recent divorcee tries to find meaning on the Fourth of July but ends up stuck in traffic. In another a suburban man unhappy with his life becomes obsessed with washing his car at a twenty four hour car wash in his neighborhood. In another young woman recollects her childhood with a single mother and how they used to paint their nails and eat breakfast together. In yet another a single person suffers through a dinner party at which they are the fifth wheel. These stories, vivid in detail, portray a stagnant land full of longing. They present a portrait of a country full of millions of lost people, trying to make sense of a world which can seem both crushing and light at the same time.

Alexander Shalom Joseph unflinchingly details the myriad micro-tragedies that make up our American Wasteland. Many of the stories in this debut collection are intense, at times hypnotic meditations on psychic loss rendered in highly attuned language. In the deeply familiar, yet disconcerting world the author narrates, our vanities and repetitive gestures alone remain to tell of our humanity.

-Eric Darton, author of Free City

Alexander Shalom Joseph has read the love-letters traded between certainty and insecurity. These stories interrogate the differing pacts we make with the world we touch and the thoughts we come to trust.

-Christopher David Rosales, author of Word is a Bone, winner of the International Latino Book Award

In American Wasteland, Joseph shines a kaleidoscopic light on the mundane until it fractures into the unexpected.

-Rachel Weaver, author of Point of Direction