Always One Mistake

A cow falls through the roof of a bar, landing on a criminal struggling with his bad choices. A recovering gambler wins and wrecks a car on the same day. A mysterious woman transforms toys and oddities into higher powers for newcomers at a twelve-step program. In a fit of road rage, an angry driver mistakenly flips off a cop. A broken man finds a curious companion while attending the reunion show of the favorite heavy-metal band from his youth. These are the strange stories of the all-too-real world of Always One Mistake. Here, author Ace Boggess shows humanity at its bleakest, but also its most hopeful. These stories are explorations of what it means to live in modern times- times filled with addiction, crime, loss, and overcoming.

Author Biography

Ace Boggess is the author of the novels States of Mercy and A Song Without a Melody, and six books of poetry, including The Prisoners, Escape Envy, Ultra Deep Field, and I Have Lost the Art of Dreaming It So. He earned his B.A. from Marshall University and his J.D. from West Virginia University. He serves as Senior Editor at The Adirondack Review and Associate Editor at The Evening Street Review. His writing has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Indiana Review, Hanging Loose, Harvard Review, J Journal, North Dakota Quarterly, and many other journals. His awards include the Robert Bausch Fiction Award and a fellowship from the West Virginia Commission on the Arts. In addition, he was locked up for five years in the West Virginia prison system, an experience which has been the basis for much of his writing. He currently resides in Charleston, West Virginia. This is his first collection of short stories.