Press Release from Black Heron Press

In Their Ruin by Joyce Goldenstern can be preordered from Amazon or Black Heron Press or from any bookstore with distribution from IPG (Independent Publishers Group) distribution — or just wait to pick up a copy at its release in July. Advance copies for purposes of review are now available through Black Heron Press, which just sent out this Press Release:

Black Heron Press/ Post Office Box 614/ Anacortes, WA 98221 / USA

Phone (360) 899-9335/ www.blackheronpress.com

Announcement of 2024 Black Heron Press Award for Social Fiction

We at Black Heron Press are pleased to announce that Joyce Goldenstern has won the 2024 Black Heron Press Award for Social Fiction for her novel In Their Ruin. This is only the eleventh time since its inception in 1996 that this award has been given.

It is the interplay between social and personal change as depicted in the growth and maturation of the characters, both major and minor, that makes this an exceptional book, and one that advances the tradition of grim realism coupled with elicited compassion that Nelson Algren and James T. Farrell started.

Ms. Goldenstern takes us on a journey that guarantees nothing, neither love nor wealth nor security nor even the sustainment of one’s own life. Yet we come to empathize with the [male characters] in their younger and older versions, with the [female characters] who come into their lives, and with their errant mother, through their successes and failures.

Though In Their Ruin is Ms. Goldenstern’s first novel, she is an accomplished stylist. Her lyrical style and its measured tone, and her knowledge of the novel’s milieu make this novel a significant contribution to American literature and to the literature of Chicago and its surroundings.