Now You See It… Stories from Cokesville, PA consists of 17 dark and hilarious interwoven short stories covering 40 years in the lives of the stories’ two main characters, Annie Kusiak and Theresa Gojuk, who vow as young girls to escape their dying rust belt town and reinvent themselves.

Theresa succeeds, becoming the soap opera star Tess Randall.  Annie struggles, going through a series of incarnations as journalist, screen writer, wife, divorcee, teacher, romance novelist, would-be convert to Judaism. 

Their mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, babbas, neighbors, priests, all stay behind, as a coal seam, burning out of control, moves toward the town like a lit fuse.  When it finally explodes, blowing Cokesville and its denizens into the annals of American archaeology, Annie realizes that her life’s work, her destiny, is to “write her way back home.”

 

Coming out in Paperback November, 27th 2007 by Picador

 

A Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year
 
Welcome to Cokesville, Pennsylvania. This is coal-and-steel country, the sort of place where an inch of soot on the windowsill means a regular paycheck--and two inches means a fat one. Where the only way to drown out the moaning of the cooling steel is to turn your radio up. And the best make-out spot in town is next to the burning slag heap. In seventeen captivating interlocking stories, Bathsheba Monk brings to life the fictional American town of Cokesville.

"A sublime and deadpan debut that cocks an eyebrow and reminds us that it is never a light thing, this leaving home, though we all must try."--Esquire
 
"Bathsheba Monk is a writer I'll be talking about when I talk about brilliant new writers. Now You See It . . . is the work of an imaginative, funny, and electrically gifted storyteller."--Tim O'Brien, author of The Things They Carried
 
"The stories use deadpan humor to combat a sense of hopelessness and economic futility."--The New Yorker
 
"[A] sassy, hard-boiled book of stories, some of which will break your heart . . . Monk's Cokesville stories convincingly span more than forty years of coal dust and hard living. . . . All of the stories are touching, some profoundly so."--The Buffalo News