Fiction writer Tom Noyes’s people are charming cynics, clever men and women who wear their intelligence lightly; they’re as manic and nervy as they are instantly likeable. Even driving from the airport to Red Lobster, they’re a pleasure to eavesdrop on. Their smart-ass banter is laced with theology and cultural criticism—but these stories have more than surface appeal. Noyes’s graceful, crisp prose, his instinct for physical gesture and timing, and his consummate skill at the pinball game of dialogue are only the tool-kit: his command of craft allows him to unfold characters in a way that swiftly moves past mere cleverness and down into the emotional tectonics of faith, affection, loyalty, and grief. If there’s any justice in publishing, more collections of his fine stories should be forthcoming.

Some of Noyes’s work is featured in Image issue 44 and issue 69. Read an excerpt by Noyes here. 

Biography

Tom Noyes’s fiction has appeared in such journals as American Literary Review, Ascent, Image, Laurel Review, Pleiades, and Third Coast, and has won various awards including the John Gilgun Award for Prose and the Whetstone Prize. In addition, his work has been a finalist in prestigious competitions including the Flannery O’Connor Award, the Bakeless Award, and the Sandstone Prize. His collection, Behold Faith and Other Stories (Dufour 2003), was short listed for Stanford’s William Saroyan Prize and garnered critical praise from many forums including the NY Times Book Review, where it was lauded for its “macabre wit and startling confessions of frailty and delusion.”

Dr. Noyes has earned degrees in writing and literature from Houghton College, Wichita State University, and Ohio University. He’s recently joined the faculty at Penn State Erie, the Behrend College, where he teaches in the BFA program and serves as consulting editor for the literary journal Lake Effect. He lives in Erie with his wife and daughter.

Current Projects
February 2006

“I am currently finishing my second story collection. The manuscript is entitled “Spooky Action at a Distance and Other Stories.” The story “Everything but Bone,” which appeared in Image, is a part of this new project.

The collection’s title comes from Einstein, who coined the phrase “spooky action at a distance” to describe the mind-bending notions of entanglement and non-locality in quantum physics. Since then the phrase has been appropriated to characterize the sometimes uncanny, even paranormal connections that seem to exist between some identical twins. The title story of the collection explores this subject to some degree, but most of the stories in the manuscript take on more familiar phenomena such as marriage, family, religion, politics, and media. The reason I like Einstein’s phrase as a title for the collection as a whole, though, is because I believe that it describes aptly, at least on some level, the mystery inherent in all human conflicts and connections, typical and atypical, those rooted in the physical and the tangible, as well as those aspiring to the spiritual, the ethereal.

When the short-fiction manuscript is finished, I plan to turn my attention to a novel, still in its very early stages, called “Brother of Jackals.” The title comes from the book of Job, as the novel’s protagonist, a dishonored, dishonorable, but repentant high school football coach and driver’s ed. teacher, believes, perhaps wrongheadedly, that there are significant parallels between his own life and the life of the longsuffering Old Testament hero.

Recently, while re-reading Job for my novel project, I came across a startling verse (14:1) that reminded me in three pithy lines why reading and writing fiction will always be worthwhile and necessary, will always be possible: ‘Man born of woman is of few days and full of trouble.'”