The Space Between Now and Then

Michael Loyd Gray's prose unspools with the unmistakable cadence of a storyteller.

-Stuart Dybek, author of The Coast of Chicago and Paper Lantern, winner of the Lannan Award, Whiting Award, Guggenheim Fellowship, and multiple O. Henry Awards

Michael Loyd Gray's fiction contains that heady brew of compassion and bravado that always leaves you rooting for the underdog. He's the sort of writer who can make you chuckle as you cry. His sensitivity and empathy for his own characters is so endearing, so admirable.

-Janet Goldberg, author of The Proprietor's Song and Like Human

In Michael Loyd Gray's "Hunters", we find an exploration of masculinity characteristic of Hemingway and Jim Harrison. Through the innocent eyes of a boy, we witness what is now called toxic masculinity, a world in which male violence is less decided on than fated. It erupts as easily across a diner table as in the woods where men hunt deer to keep from killing each other. Gray's style is spare in characterizations hard as woodcuts.

-Johnny Payne, author of A Graveyard of First Chapters, and the 2021 IBPA Ben Franklin Gold Winner, Confessions of a Gentleman Killer: A Novel

In the space between what was and what might have been, we discover who we really are.

A teenage boy watches his father take a brutal beating in a diner parking lot. A woman walks out after twenty-three years of mind-numbing marriage. A man learns on Facebook that his estranged brother has died and drives to the cemetery, wondering if he is capable of mourning someone he stopped loving long ago. A housewife feels something stir as a little handyman crawls into the darkness beneath her house.

Michael Loyd Gray maps the fractured geography of the American heartland-its dive bars and loading docks, its rivers and diners, its unspoken codes of masculinity and survival. These are stories of men and women caught between the lives they inherited and the ones they're still trying to build, wrestling with fathers who couldn't love them right, marriages that calcified into silence, and moments of grace found in unlikely places. In these pages, the hardest distance to cross is often the one between two people in the same room.

With prose as sharp as broken glass and as tender as a hand reaching across a prison booth, Gray captures working-class America at its most raw and beautiful. From the wreckage of families to the small redemptions we salvage from ruin, The Space Between Now and Then reveals what it costs to become yourself-and what remains when everything else falls away.