ONE LAST GOOD TIME
*Winner of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters award for fiction*
Bounding between the comic, the sad, and the super-strange, the ten interlinked stories in One Last Good Time breathlessly illuminate not just life at the Jersey Shore, but life anywhere it exists on the edge: between the solid and the fluid, where one runs out of land and crashes into the waves of the strange and unknown.
REVIEWS & PRAISE
“An impressive debut collection…Kardos is such an original, offbeat, revealing talent.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Michael Kardos’s soulful stories take place in that hard-luck corner of New Jersey where rock and roll dreams crash into blue-collar reality. One Last Good Time is a remarkable debut collection, full of stories that are funny and melancholy at the same time.”
–Tom Perrotta, best-selling author of The Abstinence Teacher and The Leftovers
“In One Last Good Time, Michael Kardos, a writer of exceptionally rare gifts, gives us a Jersey Shore home not only to vengeful ghosts and talking ashes and kidnappers and arm-breaking mobsters, but also—always—to ordinary human beings trying desperately, wryly, to do the best they can. The result is a book that, in story after story, is not only funny, but laugh-out-loud funny; not only poignant, but heart-wrenching. I’ve never read anything quite like it—and I will read it again and again and again.”
–Christopher Coake, PEN Award-winning author of We’re in Trouble and You Came Back