Winner, American BookFest Best Book Awards, Short Fiction (2023) Finalist, Chicago Writers Association Book Awards, Indie Fiction (2023) The seventeen unrelenting stories in Steve Fox's debut story collection, Sometimes Creek , traverse a sub-zero trail of plausible magic and grit from a kaleidoscope of broken ice at a hockey rink in Wisconsin that coils through haunted rivers and around dangling legs of jamón serrano in sweltering Spanish bars and back again to a place where Kafka and Carver meet up on the page. Fox's clean prose takes you by the hand and weaves a tapestry of tenderness, dissonance, indifference, dystopia, and charm into that gauzy space that collectively takes shape in your hands as Sometimes Creek . "An astute, confident writer spins grim but entrancing tales." -Kirkus Reviews "Unsettling though some of the stories are, others are wistful and delicate. Anything can happen in Fox's universe . . . an impressive debut." -Wisconsin People & Ideas "Disturbing, magical, and poignant." -Windy City Reviews "There's something exhilarating about the experience of reading a short story where within only a few pages and in less than an hour or so, you're left stunned and delighted." -Wisconsin Writers Association "Perfectly Midwestern, perfect portraits of perfectly imperfect people. Like coal that never turns into diamonds, but sparks up just the same." -Amber Sparks, author of And I Do Not Forgive You "The world of this book is our world, familiar and confounding, seen through a cracked and colorful glass. Endlessly surprising, strange, and satisfying." -Richard Mirabella, author of Brother & Sister Enter the Forest "Somehow Steve Fox has fused together the gravity, emotion, and darkness of William Gay, Tim O'Brien, and Ron Rash. You fall into these words, are enveloped by these lives, troubled by the uncanny." -Richard Thomas, author of Spontaneous Human Combustion "A surefooted debut centered on the myriad tender, complicated ways we connect with one another. Fox carefully tilts the familiar until it shimmers." - Kimberly King Parsons, National Book Award Finalist "Astonishingly good storytelling by Steve Fox. . . . By turns moving and funny and gothic, and always compelling." -Kathy Fish, author of Wild Life: Collected Works "All together, this is one dazzling collection you'll start to read and won't want to put down." -Alice Kaltman, author of Almost Deadly, Almost Good and Dawg Towne "Hardscrabble and tender, these seventeen story gems gleam in Midwestern dust." -Amy Cipolla Barnes, author of Child Craft Steve Fox is the winner of the Rick Bass Montana Prize for Fiction, The Great Midwest Writing Contest, the Jade Ring Award, and a Midwestern Gothic Summer Flash Contest. His fiction has appeared in New Ohio Review, Orca, a Literary Journal, Midwest Review, Midwestern Gothic, Wisconsin People & Ideas, Whitefish Review, and others. He holds a Master of Arts in Spanish from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and has lived and worked in four continents. Steve now resides in his home state of Wisconsin with his wife, Stephanie, three boys, and one dog.