DICK CHENEY SHOT ME IN THE FACE: And Other Tales Of Men In Pain is an enthralling and award-winning story collection to be re-issued alongside MEN BEHAVING BADLY. Unpredictable, humorous, sometimes dark, and surprisingly heartfelt, these stories explore the secret life of men as they pass into adulthood, middle age, and old age, confronting lust, pain, guilt, bewilderment, and mortality. In eighteen stories we meet: a distraught husband who experiences heartbreak and salvation after his wife dies in a car accident caused by a texting teenager; a successful man who returns to his hometown and finds his first love stacking jars at a local Costco; a sheriff in a Western town who confronts a pedophile and his own past abuse; an Iraq war veteran turned bodyguard who encounters the biggest threat of his life in a Las Vegas Nightclub; a successful attorney who abandons his legal career to play the iPad guitar, and Henry who is shot in the face by…Dick Cheney.

PRAISE FOR DICK CHENEY SHOT ME IN THE FACE: And Other Tales Of Men In Pain

PRE-ORDER NOW: Rare Bird Books and Amazon

MEN BEHAVING BADLY: O’Leary’s new collection is a frank, unflinching follow-up to 2017’s successful DICK CHENEY SHOT ME IN THE FACE. Here O’Leary does the impossible: dive into the psyches of the most destructive men– a stalker, a Klansman, public shooters— and creates narratives that neither rationalize, nor over-empathize. Refreshingly, these stories deliver both valuable insight, and perspective-enhancing humor. Employing fiercer social commentary and broader imagination, these new stories are concerned with justice, redemption, mockery of a decaying and violent culture and the often greedy men behind it. But for every grubby and disastrous man, there’s hope in the form of the unexpected: a centenarian whose invisibility is a weapon, a retired Montana rancher, a California tomato farmer, an elderly Black woman from Brooklyn with some powerful knitting needles, two fly fishermen–even the Earth herself. While nostalgia, humor, and blunt delivery hook the reader, O’Leary is dead serious about calling out liars, the indignities of American retirement, contagious gun violence, and other social and political ills.

PRAISE FOR MEN BEHAVING BADLY

Bristling with complex comic characters, the stories in O’Leary’s latest collection mine, with a feral brand of dark humor, many of our deepest afflictions: gun-violence, wealth disparity, mental health crises, political vacuousness, ad infinitum…This is an incriminating, daunting look in the mirror for a brand of masculinity that is “playing footsie with the grave digger.

— Chris Dombrowski, author of Body of Water

PRE-ORDER NOW: Rare Bird Books and Amazon