Fiction. Named one of Kirkus Reviews' Best Fiction Books of 2014. 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. These stories explore the domestic and professional adventures of people in over their heads, while leavening their struggles with humor. "Jacob Appel's stories echo with secrets. There are the secrets we keep from those closest to us, of course. Our parents, our doctors, our clergy, our ex-wives and unrequited loves. Any run of the mill story has those. Good stories traffic in the kind of secrets we keep from ourselves. Why, for instance, what and who we love are so close in content and character to what we can't abide. Appel's that kind of trafficker. Even better, throughout this fine collection, he is most concerned with still another kind of secret: that which, when revealed, doesn't solve anything. Like the very best stories, they carry the mystery forward. Revelation, in the end, isn't an end at all. It's a beginning. SCOUTING FOR THE REAPER is full of such revelations. Here's hoping it signals the beginning of a long string of books penned by this talented polymath."--TJ Beitelman

"Jacob Appel's acrobatic imagination is always a thrill to watch in action. These stories fly through the air and grip your heart. Appel's naturalness as a storyteller makes The Liars' Asylum a total pleasure, a collection in a league of its own. Each story-- there are no duds here-- engages and entertains. Each is beautifully measured and composed, populated by characters I worried for, crushed on, and hoped with."-- Kelly Luce "In this excellent collection of stories, Jacob Appel mines everything for what it is and what it might be: the ordinary, the bizarre, the poignant. The voice, regardless of the narrator, is always crisp and exuberant, in ways subtle and fresh. I could say he is a writer to watch, but actually he is publishing well and frequently. He's a writer to read."-- Fred Leebron "While the plants and ponds might be aggressively artificial in Jacob Appel's newest collection of stories, there's not a single false note when it comes to Appel's characters and their intertwined lives. Romance blooms despite vast differences in ages and circumstance, and near connections plunge into a unique melancholy optimism that will propel readers from one story to the next."-- Suzanne Greenberg "Jacob M. Appel's brilliant new story collection manages to pull off the rarest of literary feats-- delivering eight fantastic stories, each as entertaining as it is philosophically rich. A book of laugh-out-loud wit braided with intellectual fearlessness, The Liars' Asylum offers delights for the mind on every page. Best of all, these irreverent, lovingly subversive stories upend dusty assumptions about what it means to be alive and allow the reader to experience her own existence with a fresh eye. A stunning book that will remain with you long after the last page is turned."-- Alethea Black "Across eight compelling stories, Jacob Appel offers us glimpses into the lives of people keeping secrets, broaching taboos, and testing the limits of their relationships. From a former teacher's suicide to an epidemic of storms that forces those caught in them to tell the truth, The Liars' Asylum beautifully and artfully exposes the mysteries and longings of the human heart."-- Anne Valente "Jacob M. Appel new collection, The Liars' Asylum , confirms his status as one of our most skillful, and appealing, practitioners of short fiction. Indeed, Appel is one of those blessed and nimble writers who, like Chekhov, can find a story anywhere. On ample display are his trademark first-person narrators (often young women), his deliciously light touch, his mastery of the 'reversal of fortune' moment. His new cast of characters includes a girl tasked with ensuring her aunt a 'beau, ' an immigrant Finn who teaches us the meaning of endurance, and a ER psychiatrist dealing with a mass hysteria of truth-telling. Appel's fiction is a brilliant and reassuring example of Horace's maxim: The role of the artist is to inform and delight."-- Catherine Browder

"A couple adopts a depressed hedgehog; a stranger shows up, claiming to be the father of a girl's imaginary friend; a woman kidnaps her ex-husband's turtle; a family is evicted from their home, but was it ever really theirs? Heartbreaking and hilarious, the eight stories of Einstein's Beach House examine how we deceive ourselves and others, all to arrive at something far more real."-- back cover.

"The Amazing Mr. Morality features tenacious men and women whose determination to buck middle-class social convention draws them toward unforeseen challenges. A failed television producer insists upon having a woodchuck relocated from his lawn, only to receive desperate letters in which the woodchuck begs to return. An overconfident ne'er-do-well obtains a lucrative lecture invitation intended for a renowned ornithologist and decides to deliver the speech himself. An innocuous dispute over whether to rename a local street opens up racial fault lines that prove deadly. The collection concludes with the title novella in which two unscrupulous ethicists, writing rival newspaper columns, seek to unseat each other by addressing questions such as: If you're going to commit a murder, is it worse to kill when the victim is sleeping or awake?"--

With compassion, wit, humor, and intelligence, these stories explore the gray areas of our lives. Echoes of myth, fairy tale, and fable flavor them, underscoring the eternal nature of both the human condition and storytelling itself.

In his ninth book and fifth collection of stories, Jacob M. Appel introduces readers to a diplomat's wife who attempts to seduce her chimney sweep through Norwegian lessons, a minister whose dead wife is romantically involved with Greta Garbo, and a landlord menaced by a rent-delinquent mime.