As part of its prestigious Poetry and Fiction Series, Johns Hopkins University Press has published the new story collection THE EMPIRE OF THE DEAD.

“In this new collection, Tracy Daugherty is the maestro of middle age, and his recurrent character, Bern, is an everyman of modern times.  Daugherty writes with great skill, empathy and humor of Bern’s travails and longings.  THE EMPIRE OF THE DEAD is a superb book of stories that will burnish Daugherty’s already formidable reputation as a contemporary master of short fiction.”–Greg Johnson

“While Tracy Daugherty’s intricate, intriguing, and interconnected stories in THE EMPIRE OF THE DEAD are relentlessly narrative they invoke Donald Barthelme’s observation that collage is the art form of the century.  These rich fictions are amalgams, jeweled aggregates, beautiful breccia that sculpt the word, matrix by matrix, into lyric concreteness.  Like Barthelme, Daugherty works the leading edge of this gorgeous junk phenomena, transforming these complex meditations of our states of being into wholly new and sublime states of matter.”–Michael Martone