Robin McLean, Get ’em Young, Treat ’em Tough, Tell ’em Nothing

This will be an in-store presentation and we will live stream the evening on Zoom, please register to watch here.

If you are attending in person, for your safety and those around you, we will be requiring all audience members wear a mask.

Copies of Get 'em Young are available online here or by calling the store (505) 988-4226.

Dark, profane, and hilarious, yet ultimately humane, these ten stories are the latest and best of Robin McLean’s reports from the eternal battlefront that is the United States. Ranging across the continent, from Alaska to Missouri, from the flatlands to the mountains, each tale is a snapshot of the political, racial, and sexual undercurrents roiling contemporary life, and each finds a way into the nerves and blood that pulse beneath the question of how to live a decent life.

Here you’ll find stolen children living life to the fullest on the run and on the road, soldiers guarding empty frontiers, and rugged individualists brought low by an uncaring nature. You’ll find prehistoric beasts rubbing talons with hustlers as well as death machines lurking beneath the bucolic countryside. Here you’ll find hatred, friendship, and pitch-black humour all seething in the same stew.

Get ’em Young, Treat ’em Tough, Tell ’em Nothing marries the sardonic moral and political explorations of a Flannery O’Connor to the surreal, scuzzy wit of a Denis Johnson. It is a brazen State of the Union for a nation on the edge.

About the Author

Robin McLean worked as a lawyer and then a potter in the woods of Alaska before turning to writing. Her first story collection Reptile House won the 2013 BOA Editions Fiction Prize and was twice a finalist for the Flannery O'Connor Short Story Prize. Her debut novel Pity the Beast was published November 2o21 by And Other Stories and was noted as a best book of fiction of the year in such outlets as The Guardian, Wall Street Journal, and White Review and was long listed for the Reading the West Prize.

Gregory Martin is the author of the memoir, Stories for Boys, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick and the SEATTLE READS one city, one book selection for 2013. Martin’s first book, Mountain City, received a Washington State Book Award, was named a New York Times Notable Book, and is referred to by some people in Mountain City as “the book.” Martin’s work has appeared in such magazines as The Sun, Image, The Kenyon Review Online, Witness, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He teaches creative writing at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.