PANIO GIANOPOULOS DISCUSSES HIS NEW COLLECTION OF STORIES HOW TO GET INTO OUR HOUSE AND WHERE WE KEEP THE MONEY WITH CECIL CASTELLUCCI

How to Get into Our House and Where We Keep the Money (Four Way Books)

In this collection’s tour-de-force title story, Ethan, a marketing manager for consumer-goods brands, finds himself in a bizarre standoff with his wife, new boss, and daughter’s swim teacher over the sudden presence in his life of Scudder, Ethan’s graffiti-artist nephew. Before long, Ethan is defacing his boss’s office with dry-erase markers and climbing a condemned building in the dead of night. How swiftly, Gianopoulos reminds us, we become the very thing we’re trying to avoid; how soon we find ourselves at the point of no return: a guy whose prep school girlfriend has just “asked him to break her leg” with a cinderblock “and send her home.”

A love song to the power of the inadvertent and unplanned, this collection tracks a gaggle of lost souls—a bewildered young medical student, a man jealous of his girlfriend’s love for her tiny Pomeranian, and a restless free-diving housewife—as it captures “that itchy, panicky feeling you get when you suspect you’ve stepped into the slowest line at the supermarket.” Its characters persist in lives pockmarked with awkwardness, continually in search of “another parallel version” of themselves. Amid their domestic mayhem, Gianopoulos finds humor and warmth, an animal curled up around a protagonist’s ankle “like a misplaced comma.” How to Get into Our House and Where We Keep the Money is a witty, telling, urbane exploration of the clumsiness of relationships, of the small wars and gigantic missteps that shape our lives with our nearest and not-
always-so-dearest.

Praise for How to Get into Our House and Where We Keep the Money

“A wonderful collection of nine stories combining wry humor, engaging characters, and shrewd psychological insight....Witty, discerning, and laugh-out-loud funny.”--Kirkus Reviews Starred Review

“This is a stunning collection, brilliant in its incisive depictions of the mapless territory of midlife. From the man who despises and tries to lose his girlfriend’s dog to the would-be seducer for whom technology reveals a searing glimpse at how he is perceived by the young, these characters inspire your compassion even as they beg for your forgiveness—and even as they make you laugh out loud. Short story collections rarely arrive this compelling, this accomplished, this imaginative, and this wise. I am already impatient to share this masterful book, which I know will convert more and more readers to the joys of the form.”—Robin Black

“Panio Gianopoulos is the most natural of storytellers, and in his first collection, How to Get into Our House and Where We Keep the Money, he shows enormous range, mastery and feel for the short story. With echoes ranging from Updike to Murakami to Tom Perrotta, and a wonderfully capacious group of characters, Gianopoulos announces himself as a terrific new voice for the form. This is one to read and savor.”—Daniel Torday

“Panio Gianopoulos’s How to Get into Our House and Where We Keep the Moneyis an auspicious debut. In these smart and knowing stories, smart and knowing people come up against the limits of their knowingness and break through into a deeper humanity.”—David Gates

Panio Gianopoulos is the author of the novella A Familiar Beast. His writing has appeared in Big Fiction, Brooklyn Rail, Catamaran Literary Reader, Chicago Quarterly Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Northwest Review, Rattling Wall, and Tin House. A recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, he has been included in the anthologies The Bastard on the Couch, Cooking and Stealing: The Tin House Nonfiction Reader, and The Encyclopedia of Exes. He lives with his family in New York.

Cecil Castellucci is the author of books and graphic novels for young adults including Boy Proof, The Plain Janes, First Day on Earth and the Eisner-nominated Odd Duck. She is currently writing Shade the Changing Girl, Vol. 1 Earth Girl Made Easy, an ongoing comic on Gerard Way's DC Young Animal imprint. Her picture book, Grandma's Gloves, won the California Book Award Gold Medal. She lives in Los Angeles.