<DIV><p>"I finished this book with my heart pounding and grateful, my coffee cold and my smile wide and crying like a baby."?Daniel Handler</p><p>The characters in <I>Praying Drunk</I> speak in tongues, torture their classmates, fall in love, hunt for immortality, abandon their children, keep machetes beneath passenger seats, and collect porcelain figurines. A man crushes pills on the bathroom counter while his son watches from the hallway; missionaries clumsily navigate an uprising with barbed wire and broken glass; a boy disparages memorized scripture, facedown on the asphalt, as he fails to fend off his bully. From Kentucky to Florida to Haiti, these seemingly disparate lives are woven together within a series of nested repetitions, enacting the struggle to remain physically and spiritually alive throughout the untamable turbulence of their worlds. In a masterful blend of fiction, autobiography, and surrealism, Kyle Minor shows us that the space between fearlessness and terror is often very small. Long before <I>Praying Drunk</I> reaches its plaintive, pitch-perfect end, Minor establishes himself again and again as one of the most talented younger writers in America.<BR></DIV>