Pioneer Street

About the Book

Ever wonder what your parents were like before you got to know them? When you were a kid, did you ever long for someone to tell you who you really were? Then meet Preston Stoner. The year is 2004, and he is a somewhat bemused fifty-eight-year-old Nebraskan living in exile on Pioneer Street in Red Hook, Brooklyn, when his past abruptly reasserts itself into his life. Orphaned at five and reawakened by memories of death and betrayal often so faint as to be almost nonexistent, this devoted husband and father shares the dilemma of every saint, sinner, wise man, fool, or dullard who has spent the better part of an adult life pretending the early events of one’s childhood doesn’t matter. Bestirred by equal portions of courage and fear, born of love and contempt, this novel invites the reader to come along for the ride as events contrast back and forth between Preston’s inalterable, virtually unknowable childhood past in Beatrice, Nebraska, and his painfully all-too-knowable, somewhat-humdrum, somewhat-chaotic present-day life in Brooklyn.

About the Author

In 2006, Thomas Lisenbee—small town Kansan, born and bred—celebrated the end of a highly successful forty-one-year career as a New York City freelance musician by selling his trumpets and taking up the pen. A performance poet, he is the author of Dogwalking and co-author of Three from Osage Street. Winner of the Richard Bauch Prize for short fiction, shortlisted for the Raymond Carver Prize, acclaimed by Glimmertrain as one of “America’s Best New Authors,” his short fiction selected for The Best of Our Stories, volumes 1 and 3, Pioneer Street is his first novel.