With stories rooted in the wrenching events that bind one person to another--from a Scandinavian retiree arrested for hiring a prostitute, to a Korean adoptee seeing her adoptive father through his last days--Nick Healy plumbs the compromises and tragedies that underlie Minnesota Nice. Winner of a Many Voices Project award from New Rivers Press, It Takes You Over is Nick Healy’s first short story collection.

Readers were introduced to Nick Healy’s fiction when “And Other Delights” was chosen for the 2005 Speakeasy Prize from the Loft Literary Center/Speakeasy magazine. Since then, Healy’s stories have found an audience in the Midwest and across the country. A native of St. Paul, Healy now lives in Mankato, Minnesota, with his wife and their two children.

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Set against the backdrop of Russian history from the time of Peter the Great to the years of the post-Soviet collapse, the nine stories in Vladimir's Mustache represent a rare feat of ventriloquism and range. From an Italian castrato who longs to sing for the tsar, to a method actor who learns the danger of losing himself in a role after he is cast as Hitler, to the men and women who meet through "mail order bride agencies, all of Stephan Eirik Clark's stories are told with a humor that's never far removed from an underlying sadness. Regardless of his where he situates his attention, Clark writes with a voice that never falters, telling with great emotional honesty the story of men and women who are trapped by circumstances, alienated by history, or irrevocably estranged from the culture at large.

Stephan Eirik Clark’s short stories and essays have appeared in more than twenty literary magazines, including Ninth Letter, Witness, and The Cincinnati Review, and been short-listed for the Fish Publishing Historical Fiction Prize and recognized in Best American Essays 2009 and 2010, among other honors. He is presently teaching at Augsburg College in Minneapolis.