Pleased to Be Otherwise (Kindle Single) (Ploughshares Solos Book 8)

Timi, a boy in Uzbekistan, navigates a strange world of camel breeding, half-understood Islamic doctrine, Mexican soap operas dubbed into Uzbek, and the legacy of widespread pollution from the Soviet era, all while dreaming of doing death-defying stunts on his rickety motorcycle.

Lonely and accident-prone, Timi befriends an American humanitarian worker in a struggling marriage, tries to avoid his father's frequent rages, and plans out the astonishing motorcycle jump that will give meaning to his life. A brilliant, comic look at an almost unknown country and its fascinating contradictions.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gina Ochsner lives in Keizer, Oregon, and divides her time between writing and teaching with the Seattle Pacific Low-Residency MFA program. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, Glimmertrain, and the Kenyon Review. She is the author of the short story collection The Necessary Grace to Fall, which received the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and the story collection People I Wanted to Be. Both books received the Oregon Book Award. A novel entitled The Russian Dreambook of Colour and Flight appeared from Portobello Press and from Houghton-Mifflin-Harcourt in 2009.

PRAISE FOR GINA OCHSNER

"Ochsner's flawed, wholly sympathetic characters miraculously stumble into small moments, shaped with a delicious sense of the absurd, which connect them to a world that's magical, merciful, and infinite." —Booklist

"...with luminous writing, affection for her characters and, especially, faith in the language's humanizing power, [Ochsner] manages to find a portion of hopefulness." —Ken Kalfus, The New York Times