Some Rough Beast and Other Stories

By Dave Margoshes

Dave Margoshes, winner of the 2026 Cheryl and Henry Kloppenburg Award for Literary Excellence, opens his new collection with God’s head rolling across the still-soft earth and closes it with a mugging that will not stay in the past.

In between: a magpie and a three-month-old baby swap souls in a New Jersey thunderstorm. A small-town mechanic, oil still on his hands, finds himself thinking about a widow. On his ninetieth birthday, a Harvard professor phones everyone he meant to say goodbye to and finds almost no one left to answer. An eighty-one-year-old woman who once slept with Elvis lets a man named Elmer take her to dinner. Holden knocks on a door on Violet Street, fifteen years late.

In one story, God offers three questions and answers in the voice of a Yiddish grandmother who survived the camps and is running out of patience. A boy is born with the face of a golden retriever and grows up to publish poetry under the name Ralph Waldo Canin. Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi have lunch. Snow falls on Saskatoon for a week in July. And in the title story, Yeats’s rough beast is not slouching toward Bethlehem: it is the extra blow after the wallet is already gone, and then, decades later, a gun in a corner grocery.

In twenty-two short stories, Dave Margoshes reports the impossible in the same plain voice he uses for a garage or a ball diamond: the unforgettable voice of a master of the form.