Cover Photo: photo by Mike Liu/flickr
photo by Mike Liu/flickr

The Book in the Box

Getting trashed was my way of announcing who I was: not Mormon.

When I left for college in 1984, I packed some things in a banana box I brought home from Safeway. The box was sturdy, with useful handles cut in the sides, and large, less useful holes at the top and bottom.

Shawn Vestal's novel, Daredevils, was published in April by Penguin Press. His collection of short stories, Godforsaken Idaho, won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for debut fiction in 2014. A graduate of the MFA program at Eastern Washington University, he lives with his wife and son in Spokane, Washington, where he is a columnist for The Spokesman-Review.