Pieta - Softcover

William Zink is the author of three previous novels and four books of poetry. His most recent novel, Ohio River Dialogues, was a finalist for the 2008 Ohioana Fiction Award.

We are in a time not unlike the 30s, when the need for job now rises high above the faraway dream of getting the right credentials from the right places. And so with literature, where a tide will be coming from the heartland, the boonies, and inner cities of brown, black, and white America. Its authors will be without proper literary pedigrees, they will have attended but done poorly in boring high schools, maybe gone to community college for a while, did or did not graduate from a four-year Institution of higher learning. Definitely not with laurels bestowed upon them by the top-tier universities, not fairy-dusted by a so-admired writing program, they will write about the common and the poor among us, those working more hours than they want, or much less than they need. William Zink is not the first, but he is certainly among the most ambitious of them in this coming wave. --Dagoberto Gilb

Pieta is a true and generous wonder of a novel. In sharp, beautifully written prose, William Zink takes on big themes - love and devotion and family and death - and makes us all the better for it. --Donald Ray Pollock, author of Knockemstiff