Stephen Beachy: 4 books

In this unusual “collaborative novel,” Jake Yoder, a precocious boy caught between Amish culture and the modern world, sits in his middle-school classroom writing stories at the behest of a stern but charismatic teacher. Jake's stories feature children who are crushed, imprisoned, and distorted,...

It’s the 90s. Reggie, a young hustler, is bouncing around the country trying to stave off personal catastrophe. With his own drug-addled sense of history merging with prophecy, and his own destiny merging with something he begins to suspect is evil, the scope of the catastrophe seems increasingly...

A pair of novellas, lyrical, haunting, and bleak, that offer an unsparing yet emotionally rich vision of contemporary America. In Some Phantom an unnamed woman arrives in a strange city, fleeing a violent relationship. She begins to explore the city and its inhabitants and takes a job teaching disturbed...

An enthralling, epic tale of the webs of misinformation that saturate, obscure, and complicate the vagaries of day-to-day life in modern America. It’s 2006, and a cloud of darkness seems to have descended over the Earth—or at least over the minds of a ragtag assortment of Bay Area writers,...