Drowning Practice

Mike Meginnis is the author of Fat Man and Little Boy. His fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2012, Unstuck, The Collagist, PANK, Hayden's Ferry Review, and many other outlets. He lives and works in Iowa City.

"In a literary landscape littered with post-apocalyptic novels, Meginnis has created something distinctive." - Washington Post

"Meginnis engagingly finds ways to bring Mott and Lyd real happiness while avoiding clichés or tired, easy answers...Twisty and moving, this is an apocalypse novel that will keep readers guessing till the last page." - Kirkus Reviews

"Drowning Practice is the best new novel I've read in ages. Its heroines Mott and Lyd are surprising and compelling, a daughter and mother not merely surviving the end of their world but determined to make something new before it comes. So many apocalypses diminish the world, robbing it of its glories: here Mike Meginnis sets out to restore its wonder. In doing so, he's gifted us a novel of haunting grace and deep, difficult love, a story I don't believe I'll ever forget." - Matt Bell, author of Appleseed

"This dreamlike novel reinvents the apocalypse to explore the moral ambiguities of family love, social convention, and the creative imagination. It's scary and funny and completely surprising. With Drowning Practice, Mike Meginnis has given us a startling and moving meditation on a world forever roiled by and in recovery from catastrophe-that is to say, a world much like ours." - J. Robert Lennon, author of Subdivision

"Drowning Practice is a book about a dream, and it reads like a dream too: melancholy and luminous, looping and discursive, resistant to easy interpretation...mesmerizing...like a dream, it follows its own logic, and like many dreams, it has stayed with me in the waking hours since I emerged." - New York Times