He is a past winner of the Boston Review Short Fiction Competition, the William Faulkner- William Wisdom Award for the Short Story, the Arts & Letters Prize for Fiction, the North American Review's Kurt Vonnegut Prize, the Missouri Review's Editor's Prize, the Sycamore Review's Wabash Prize, the Briar Cliff Review's Short Fiction Prize, the Salem College Center for Women Writers' Reynolds Price Short Fiction Award, the New Millennium Writings Fiction Award on four separate occasions, and a Sherwood Anderson Foundation Writers Grant. His short fiction has appeared in more than two hundred literary journals including Colorado Review, Gettysburg Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Southwest Review, Threepenny Review and Virginia Quarterly Review. Appel is the author of the novels The Man Who Wouldn't Stand Up (2012), which won the Dundee International Book Award, and The Biology of Luck (2013). Here's hoping it signals the beginning of a long string of books penned by this talented polymath."-TJ Beitelman SCOUTING FOR THE REAPER is full of such revelations. Revelation, in the end, isn't an end at all.
Like the very best stories, they carry the mystery forward. Even better, throughout this fine collection, he is most concerned with still another kind of secret: that which, when revealed, doesn't solve anything. Why, for instance, what and who we love are so close in content and character to what we can't abide. Good stories traffic in the kind of secrets we keep from ourselves. Our parents, our doctors, our clergy, our ex-wives and unrequited loves. There are the secrets we keep from those closest to us, of course. "Jacob Appel's stories echo with secrets. These stories explore the domestic and professional adventures of people in over their heads, while leavening their struggles with humor. Each of the characters in SCOUTING FOR THE REAPER faces an unanticipated challenge: transporting a truckload of penguins across the country, arranging a proper Jewish burial for the remains of Gregor Samsa, and selling tombstones dressed as a Girl Scout.
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