Sean Ennis is a Philadelphia native, now living in Water Valley, MS. His fiction has appeared in Tin House, Crazyhorse, Diagram, Hobart, The Mississippi Review, Wigleaf, and Pithead Chapel. A recipient of a Mississippi Arts Commission literary grant, he is the author of the story collections, Cunning, Baffling, Powerful (Thirty West) and Chase Us: Stories (Little A/New Harvest).
“The first time I met Sean, we were splitting cigs by these repainted McDonald’s coil spring rockers at this writing residency. I was awed by his writing in those workshops then and I’m equally awed by his writing now. Cunning, Baffling, Powerful is a wild, but equally empathetic collection of seven stories of hard luck people in treatment gritting through the process, buoyed by their behind-each-other’s-backs backstories and whisper-thin relationships based on what they know about one another’s drug of choice, hard stuff or candy-coated. The experience of reading this collection is not unlike smoking a cigarette. Sean’s writing sends a jolt to the pleasure center of your brain, although you also know there’s a good chance you’ll hurt in the end. But you can’t wait to sneak the next one, the disagreeing faces of passersby judging you for waving it around in public like that.”
—Gene Kwak, author of Go Home, Ricky!
**Shortlisted for The William Saroyan International Prize for Writing**
"Ennis’s debut collection provides glimpses into the lives of a cohort of boys from the outskirts of Philadelphia, who grow older but never really grow up. In most of the stories, the boys are adolescent—shooting bows and arrows, playing suicide against a wall with a tennis ball, drinking their first beers—and Ennis nails the spite, tenderness, and trepidation in the voice of both an 11-year-old boy and the man he becomes....Whether he’s portraying a teenage war between skaters and “guidos” or the vulnerability of a father holding a newborn baby, the author presents the raw messiness of fear and confusion through a lyric cadence....[I]t’s clear by the end of the book that Ennis has crafted a beautiful, hard-hitting collection. " --Publishers Weekly
"In tough, spare prose that spares nothing, Ennis delivers us into a world that reveals the simultaneous innocence and brutality of adolescence. These stories beautifully capture a lingering dream of childhood." --Brad Watson, author of Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives and The Heaven of Mercury
"Stories that are thoughtful, funny, and just the slightest bit strange...Ennis is a brilliant writer, and this is a terrific performance." --Tom Franklin, author of Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter