Away to Stay - Paperback

by Mary Kuryla (Author)

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Weary of rundown motels and long nights sleeping in her mother's car, Olya wants nothing more than a home. It seems she might finally find one with Jack, her mother's cousin who lives in a tumbledown ranch in Southern California's Inland Empire. But safety is not all that it seems.

Away to Stay burns with the urgency of its young narrator who bears witness to a world of desperate people flailing inside a broken system. Olya's mother Irina is a Russian émigré and self-serving liar, obsessed with becoming a prima ballerina and stalking Mikhail Baryshnikov. Cousin Jack is haunted by demons from the Afghanistan war--and the oft-absent Irina. Jack turns his obsession onto his untrainable dog named Bird that he kidnapped from the Riverside Police Department. To Olya, Bird is Job on four legs. Away to Stay is an off-beat and probing exploration of the precarity of shelter and home in the life of an immigrant and American working family.

Author Biography

Mary Kuryla's collection Freak Weather: Stories won the AWP Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction and was published by University of Massachusetts Press. Her stories have received The Pushcart Prize and the Glimmer Train Very Short Fiction Prize and appeared in The Paris Review, Conjunctions, Agni, Epoch, and elsewhere.

Her award-winning shorts and feature films have premiered at Sundance and Toronto. She has written screen adaptations for studios and independents. Kuryla is a screenwriting professor in the School of Film and TV at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.