How to Be Lonely by Dave Mainelli

Praise for How to Be Lonely

In Mainelli’s stories, characters wish for the American dream. We could have God, money, and sex if we just find the key. But the key is out of reach. In one story, a man inherits $150K, and you think he’s found it. But happiness eludes him. Americans think they deserve to be happy, but in these stories, we don’t know how to make ourselves happy; it’s always achingly out of reach. Mainelli elbows into Denis Johnson’s territory here, gritty working-class middle America, dreaming of something we see on TV, something we can almost imagine feeling. These stories are raw and gritty, and as we settle into a hard year, these are the stories we will yearn for.

Kate Gale, Author of Goldilocks Zone

“But it has become more necessary,” he told her, “to know I am not crazy, than it is to be healed.”  David Mainelli’s people have nerves so frayed you pray for their vulnerable hearts, page by steel-edged page. I see a book in flames. Truth and redemption are fighting under apocalyptic American skies. A holy book of domestic passions by a writer so fiercely graced with insights into the heart’s naked chambers you just sit stunned.

Tom Paine, Author of A Boy’s Book of Nervous Breakdowns


About the Author

Dave Mainelli is a writer from Omaha, Nebraska. In 2012, Dave came down with a serious illness and reestablished some priorities in his life. Music and writing came to the forefront and has remained there since. He’s a graduate of the University of Nebraska MFA in Fiction and a singing/songwriting member of Bazile Mills. He’s also owned restaurants for over 25 years and has traveled around the world as a business consultant. He now teaches writing at Iowa Western and Wayne State College. How to Be Lonely is his first book of short stories.

How to Be Lonely
Dave Mainelli
Perfect Paperback: 226
ISBN-13: 978-1732027572
WSC Press (March 2021)