Tyler McAndrew "My Prisoner & Other Stories" (w/ William Lychack)

We are thrilled to host debut author and friend of White Whale Tyler McAndrew in-store to celebrate the launch of My Prisoner & Other Stories! My Prisoner & Other Stories is a deeply human short story collection - grappling with the everyday violence and tenderness of lonliness and the connections that bind us together. Tyler will be in conversation with local professor and author, William Lychack.

Set largely in the 1990s and early 2000s Rust Belt, My Prisoner and Other Stories gives us protagonists who repeatedly confront helplessness in the face of others’ suffering. A teenage girl tries to help an elderly woman who has locked herself out of her house only to be shaken by the trauma and loneliness that the woman—a Holocaust survivor and recent widow—eventually shares with her. A schoolteacher writes letters to his cousin, who has schizophrenia and is serving a life sentence for the M**der of three of their relatives. A middle school student makes a complicated gesture of charity after befriending the poor kid at his lunch table. Siblings seed the ground for an eccentric treasure hunter only to find that their prank leads them into unexpected emotional peril. The structural forces that stain life in late-capitalist America—the Pr*son system, economic desperation—lurk throughout these muscular and empathetic tales, but in the face of endemic adversity, shrewd and loving characters strive for and sometimes achieve hope and tenderness. Tyler McAndrew shows us an unadorned America that can still tap its capacity for human kindness.

“With precision, heart, spine, and bite, Tyler McAndrew charts the often-treacherous terrain between loneliness and grace. A young boy befriends an unseen prisoner at the edge of the woods, a divorced father haunts his former family from inside the walls of their house, a daughter watches her mother’s mind slowly betray them both—these are stories marked by deep compassion, where small gestures illuminate the largest mysteries of life. In this brave debut, we find proof that, even in our most solitary hours, we are firmly bound to one another through memory and love.” —William Lychack, author of Cargill Falls

Heartbreaking and at times unrelenting in its humanity, My Prisoner and Other Stories offers an empathetic look at the violence and tenderness within everyday existence. McAndrew challenges readers to hold onto wonder, even as they are confronted with the brok

enness of his characters and of the world at large.” —Thao Thai, author of Banyan Moon “These stories orbit misunderstandings, mishaps, miscommunications, each shining a spotlight on a character seeking and aching for some kind of connection, the very thing I desire from a short story, from art—to be pulled into its orbit, to be made to feel a connection. If you’re reading this now, I’m excited for and jealous of you spending time with this beautiful collection.” —Aaron Burch, author of Year of the Buffalo “McAndrew doesn’t shrink from asking big moral questions, and his fiction abounds with lived-in touches and a sense of scale.” —Kirkus Reviews

WILLIAM LYCHACK is the author, most recently, of the novel Cargill Falls. His work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, and on public radio’s This American Life, and his awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Sherwood Anderson Award, a Christopher Isherwood Foundation Award, a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection, and a Pittsburgh Foundation Grant. He currently teaches in the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh and is the author of five previous books, including a novel, The Wasp Eater, a collection of stories, The Architect of Flowers, a cultural history of cement, and two children’s books.

Born and raised in Syracuse, NY, TYLER MCANDREW is the author of the short story collection My Prisoner & Other Stories (Mad Creek Books / Ohio State University Press, 2025), which won the 2024 Non / Fiction Prize. The stories in My Prisoner explore the rippling effects of violence and the often-treacherous terrain between loneliness and grace. McAndrew currently lives in Pittsburgh, PA and teaches in the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh, where he earned his MFA, and where he was recently the recipient of the 2025 Jeff Oaks Memorial Teaching Award. He also works as the high school fiction teacher for the Literary Arts program at CAPA 6-12, a magnet school for creative and performing arts in Pittsburgh’s Public School District. His short stories, essays, and poems have appeared in literary journals, such as Epoch, Electric Literature, The Baffler, and others.

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