All That Is Left Is All That Matters: Stories - Hardcover

Mark Slouka’s most recent books are the story collection All That Is Left Is All That Matters, the memoir Nobody’s Son, and the award-winning novel Brewster. His work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Essays, and the PEN / O. Henry Prize Stories. He lives in Prague.

“Slouka showcases not merely his productivity and versatility, but his gift for creating consistently engaging and emotionally resonant stories in whatever literary form he chooses. . . . stories as tender and beautiful as these are among those things that might, paradoxically, serve to persuade thoughtful readers that life is worth living.”
- Shelf Awareness

“Crisp, poignant. . . . These are subtle, meditative, well-crafted stories, death-backed but life-affirming.”
- Kirkus

“The power in the memories [Slouka] so intensely evokes is heart stopping in its beauty, liberating in its acknowledgment of essential truths. . . . Put Slouka's work in the hands of fans of the Richards―Ford, Powers, and Russo―and watch what happens.”
- Booklist, starred

“Disquieting, sharply compressed short stories. . . . Even the most seemingly casual of these tales vibrate with danger, and together, they create the sense of a world where unendurable loss is just one misplaced footstep away.”
- Publishers Weekly

“Mark Slouka is one of the best American writers alive today, and the title of his new story collection is perfect: this is essential stuff, and it will break your heart.”
- Brian Hall, author of Fall of Frost

“The subtlety of these wonderful stories takes you by stealth. They leave you with the startled feeling that you’ve traveled a long distance and emerged in an unexpected new place. Mark Slouka is a writer of enormous and unusual gifts, and he offers them graciously and with an appealing wryness.”
- Lynne Sharon Schwartz, author of Two-Part Inventions

“Mark Slouka perfectly breaks open my heart with each truthful, gorgeous sentence. I wish I could write out for you all the sentences and passages I underlined. But that would be the whole shebang, the whole damn book.”
- Victoria Redel, author of Before Everything

“Few writers convey the urgencies of the heart like Mark Slouka does. Remorse, betrayal, fear, mortality―love, most of all―in these wondrous stories the most powerful emotions shine from the smallest details: the lonely creak of oarlocks, the silence of a man about to cry, the groan of a screen door opening a lifetime ago, the lies with which we console ourselves against inevitable loss.”
- Andrew Foster Altschul, author of Lady Lazarus

“Mark Slouka knows the secrets of story-making: the complex characters registered with the flick of a gesture, the catch-breath moments of collapsing certainty, the unerring recoil of memory―and in every line the razor’s edge, the frightful mortal implication. All That Is Left Is All That Matters is a perfectly titled and brilliantly written collection.”
- Sven Birkerts, author of Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age