Campfires of the Dead and the Living: The Collected Stories of Peter Christopher

Campfires of the Dead and the Living is a collection of short fiction by Peter Christopher. This volume contains The Living – an unpublished collection of stories written between 1990 and 2004 – and Campfires of the Dead – Christopher’s first collection, out of print for more than three decades and originally published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1989.

Peter Christopher taught at Georgia Southern University for many years and was a recipient of a 1991 National Endowment of the Arts fellowship in creative writing. Though only Campfires of the Dead was published during his lifetime, through his teaching, mentorship, and friendships, Christopher had a lasting impact on writers Harry Crews, Gordon Lish, and Chuck Palahniuk among others.

[Campfires of the Dead and the Living] is a double heart attack of vitality and violence, of American poverty and male wretchedness, of broken beauty and hope against hope. — The New York Times

May this book make you a better reader. If you write, may it make you a better writer. –  Chuck Palahniuk (from the introduction)

Here is a vision and voice that your heart and blood will never forget. It is about the forgotten, the hurt, and the helpless, but Peter Christopher’s magic makes these people whole again. I am grateful for finding this book. —Harry Crews

Peter Christopher? A case wherein it’s the man, not the littérateur, that demands remark—to wit, never knew, will never know, an instance of better, dearer, sweeter. That was Peter, none greater, not just a mensch but a mensch and a half. – Gordon Lish

Peter Christopher was a deep-hearted and clear-eyed beholder of every rank loveliness of the human estate.  He was a master of the slang-shot sentence of manic downtroddendom, a genius of the nerve-stretching violent quiets of the failing and the failed.  Here in one abounding volume are the long-overdue début of one collection of soul-boiling fictions and a return to circulation of another--the legacy of an extraordinary writer reworking the American short story with full, determining force.  — Garielle Lutz

For years I've been xeroxing Peter Christopher's stories for my writing students. Finally, here are Christopher's collected stories, a book so full of grit and heart, compassion and rage, that I challenge you to read his stories without being changed as a person walking the earth. Campfires of the Dead and the Living is a remarkable, muscular book by a brilliant and fearless writer. – Victoria Redel

Hilariously raw, chiseled and brilliant, the posthumously collected work of Peter Christopher hitchhikes the outskirts of lives lived on a hardest edge—Hey, ninja beauties and Mr. Death, stray cats and ghost-face killers, wow. I loved these stories, their heart and illuminate lightning. This is maximalist fiction at its sonic best. – William Tester

If we could all look at the world the way the stories of Peter Christopher do, maybe we would be kinder to each other. I’m continuously impressed with the rendering of language in his work: every bit brings me to my knees. Campfires of the Dead and the Living is so good it makes you truly realize you really can do anything in a short story, whatever the fuck you want, as long as each sentence leads the reader to the perfect point of heartbreak. – Elle Nash

How exquisitely Peter Christopher hears—how exacting and cussed and tender and pitch-perfect are the voices. Sentence after luminous sentence I’m reminded of all the ways cadence restores us. This is a rewilding by language’s music: hushed lowlands, incandescent riffs, and “whippoorwill harmonics.” I would listen to these stories forever. – Geri Doran

Here’s a bulletin from the other America, the down and out, the damaged, the unlucky, the disenfranchised. . . searing stories told in rough and poetic language. Unforgettable and necessary. — Lee Smith

I read Peter Christopher’s Campfires of the Dead and the Living in front of a space heater (an indoor campfire) in Chattanooga, Tennessee where the raccoons have come out from the dark to play with the chipmunks. Gently and unapologetically surged with domestic wild animal life and everyday tedium, Christopher’s ever unrestrainable, shifting stories dare us to care. His stories are leisurely compassionate, spermatically original, and deftly defiant of all caustic arrogance by faithfully recording the comic discord and consonance in our humanity. The titles to his stories are a riot! He is funny. He is wild. He is unexpected. He does not pontificate. He does not flicker nor flinch nor whinge like a frightened cat, but boldly tugs and pulls and ticks and flips our imagination with an eye for conversation and an eye for quotidian details. His suave, sidesplitting stories will warm your bittered hearts up like a shot of whiskey aged over night by the distilled malted grain of his work’s transient timelessly and keep them sober until your heart and mind become hysterical with petrified fever for the unknown. –Vi Khi Nao

Out now! // September 27, 2022

ISBN: 9781948687447 (paperback)

ISBN: 9781948687911 (ebook)

About the Author

Peter Christopher was an award-winning author and journalist. He was a writer-in-residence for the Writers Voice Workshop and a guest lecturer at Columbia University, New York University, University of Florida, and Portland State University's Haystack Program in the Arts. Peter curated a reading series for the New York Public Library and La Mama La Gallerica Second Classe. He joined the faculty of the Georgia Southern Writing and Linguistics Department in 1998, where he was instrumental in establishing and building the creative writing program. Peter inspired countless students, winning Georgia Southern University’s Dorothy Smith Golden Award for Excellence in Teaching. He also was awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and First Place in Story's Naked Fiction Competition. Peter passed away in 2008 at the age of 52.