Homefront by Kristen Tsetsi

Tuesday, April 17th, 2012 | Posted in: Home,Kristen Tsetsi,Our Books

“I smell yoru shirt sometimes, but not foten,” Mia writes, those slurred keyboard strokes the only connection to her deployed beloved, who she sees everywhere and nowhere in the demure military town. A former English professor, Mia passes the time working as a cab driver, mulling over the intricacies of her encounters with others who are affected by the war: her dramatic future mother in-law who eats bad news for breakfast, a charismatic alcoholic who may have been a medic in Vietnam, a pragmatic but secretive long-time army wife, and a soldier who found a way to stay home. Pretty Much True… is the war story that’s seldom told—the loss and love in every hour of deployment, and a painfully intimate portrait of lives spent waiting in the spaces between.

Pretty Much True… is the new title under which the previously self-published Homefront (read about it in the Stars and Stripes and the Huffington Post) will be released, date and press to be announced.

“One of the most powerful and brilliant books I have read in a long time. Make this the next book you read.” – PopCultureZoo

“Haunting and lyrical. Tsetsi has illuminated this part of war with her crystalline prose and near-perfect rendering of a story about those who wait under the awful burden of not knowing an outcome.  Americans are getting a finer sense of who we are at an important time in our history because of the quality of literature from female writers with voices beautifully calibrated to sing out our zeitgeist. And this debut novel by the grandly talented Kristen Tsetsi delivers the best kind of fiction—a story suffused with a brightness that shines truer than the truth.”” –James Moore, Emmy Award-winning former television news correspondent and co-author of the bestselling, Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential and Adios, MoFo.

Tsetsi is a former staff writer for the Journal Inquirer newspaper, a former Women’s eNews correspondent, a former English professor, creative writing, playwriting, and screenwriting instructor, an award-winning fiction writer and Pushcart Prize nominee, co-editor of the literary journal American Fiction, and the wife of a former Chinook pilot for the 101st Airborne Division who deployed to Iraq in 2003. Her short fiction collection, Carol’s Aquarium, is available for Kindle.

“This is the sort of narrative voice I like in short fiction. The themes [in Carol's Aquarium] are very pointed, and the writing is confident enough to deliver the emotional payload like a blow to the chest with a knife-blade.” – POD People

PRETTY MUCH TRUE…

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“There are many novels about war, most from the battlefield where there’s page-turning tension and drama. But there are few stories written from the point of view of a loved one back home waiting, and waiting some more, not knowing if or how the soldier will return home. Perhaps that’s because so few have found an interesting way to write such a story, but that has changed, thanks to Kristen Tsetsi.” – Carol Hoenig, the Huffington Post

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“Completely engrossing…totally spellbinding.“ – Stacy Leiser, the Leaf Chronicle

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“Soulful. Seductive.” –Josip Novakovich, author of April Fool’s Day

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“[Pretty Much True...] is a powerful novel with wonderful echoes of Viet Nam and our country’s tortured response to that war.””–Paul Griner, author of The German Woman

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“Beautiful and stark.” –Feministing.com

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“Pretty Much True… reads like a long-form haiku written by Charles Bukowski in collaboration with Ann Beattie; almost every paragraph is a stand-alone gem of insight and observation.” –Rick Shefchik, journalist, award-winning columnist, and author of Green Monster and Amen Corner

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“Tsetsi’s solid, seamless, and detailed writing has the power to bring us into each scene.” –Sonia Reppe, Bookpleasures

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“An intensely intimate and affecting story…I was 100 pages into Pretty Much True… before I looked up from the book.” –Steven McDermott, Storyglossia

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