Writer and friend of the family
Nathan Graziano
FULL-LENGTH BOOKS
BORN ON GOOD FRIDAY (2023)
ISBN: 979-8-851193-24-8
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When you were born at exactly 3 p.m. on Good Friday, you can either start a cult, or write poems and live a life of relative obscurity.
Nathan Graziano chose the latter, and in Born on Good Friday—his first collection of poems in nearly a decade—he addresses his complicated relationship with Catholicism and guilt while staring down his vices and a veritable midlife crisis with some doom, some sprinkles of gloom, and an abundance of good humor.
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FLY LIKE THE SEAGULL (2020)
ISBN: 978-1-952411-05-2
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​The fictional town of Northboro is estranged from its faith, the relationships are fraught with infidelities and art has been relegated to a topical afterthought. Its denizens desperately need a new mythology, an unlikely angel—-a polymorph with “a bald dome and inky black hair pulled into a tight ponytail.”
Enter The Seagull.
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Listen to Thaddeus Kraus's audio version here.​
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ALMOST CHRISTMAS (2017)
ISBN-13: 978-06929864769
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The characters in Nathan Graziano’s dark fictional backdrop are waiting—waiting for the next fix, the next fling, the next inevitable miscue or mistake. In Almost Christmas we’re confronted by junkies and drunks, scorned lovers, the lonely and the lost. This collection of short prose pieces tackles the breakdown of the modern marriage, the existential despair of technological times, and the ubiquity of the current opiate epidemic. Without flinching, Graziano introduces a hardened world populated by the desperate and vulnerable people we’d rather ignore while our stringing lights and singing our carols, waiting for Christmas.
MY NEXT BAD DECISION (2014)
ISBN-978-1-4951-1123-5
Graziano reminds us that young love is often flooded by self-doubt and self-loathing, that sometimes the hero and the villain are inseparable. His ability to create multidimensional characters who are not afraid to offend sets him apart from other writers. My Next Bad Decision shows how the transition from young adult to parent is anything but neat and that is what makes these poems engaging. We, as readers, can read about transgressions that we have committed but don't have the guts to share.
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SOME SORT OF UGLY (2013)
Hamlet Burns is a college freshman in 1992, unknowingly about to begin four years of rowdy roommates, STDs, and ill-timed explosions of gas. Along the way, Ham drinks a few beers, breaks a few hearts, and has a near-fatal brush with Hootie and the Blowfish. Some Sort of Ugly is the tale of Ham’s journey from boy to man, and the women who help him get there. The book is a mix of raunchy humor and nostalgic wisdom, a true coming-of-age journey.
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Listen to Thaddeus Kraus's audio version here.
HANGOVER BREAKFASTS (2012)
ISBN-978-1-937073-38-1
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Hangover Breakfasts, a series of short prose pieces, follows four friends living in a summer rental house on New Hampshire's Lake Winona the year after finishing college. After enduring a brutal winter, the roommates struggle to define their adult identities as they attempt to soothe cabin fever with hard drugs, alcohol and an impetuous cross-country jaunt.
AFTER THE HONEYMOON (2009)
ISBN-978-1-934513-19-4
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After the last toast, when the din of the wedding bells has died and the photo albums have slumped into a closet, the stark truths become exposed. After the Honeymoon takes a sober and sometimes humorous look at the joys and the malaise of marriage and parenthood, demons and addictions, and the demise of youth in American culture.
TEACHING METAPHORS (2007)
ISBN-978-0-9769857-9-2
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Teaching Metaphors goes beyond the lesson plans and standardized tests to probe the humanity of the modern high school. It draws composities of faculty and students as both metaphor and microcosm. From a homecoming princess sacrificed on the stake of popularity to a nostalgic literature teacher who won't let go of The Canon, the book juxtaposes characters of an imaginative high school to examine the core of our common experiences.
FROSTBITE (2002)
ISBN-1-8914008-26-7
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The bleak winter landscape of small town New Hampshire provides the setting for a chronicle of working class life. Frostbite connects such unlikely characters as a hirsute librarian, a testosterone-addled dwarf with an air guitar problem, a professional convenience store clerk with punk rock aspirations and the vicarious victim of a devastating moose accident in their attempts to transcend the monotony of their menial existances-- only to find themselves bound by the natural elements and their own demons.