The Thief of Words is filled with desperate runaways, the unhappily married, and the displaced. These characters often long for happiness but struggle to explain—even to themselves—what that would entail.

The lightly interconnected stories in this riveting collection are split between the Polish American communities of northern Wisconsin and Louisiana, where refugees from World War II were resettled. Exploring themes of dislocation and assimilation, love and loneliness, and generational conflict, Anthony Bukoski admirably paints portraits of people doing their best, despite the odds and their sometimes-thwarted attempts to follow the urgings of their better angels.

Anthony Bukoski is an award-winning writer and a fellow of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. A professor emeritus of English at the University of Wisconsin–Superior, he is the author of The Blondes of Wisconsin, Time Between Trains, Children of Strangers, and Polonaise.

Carol Dunbar is a working writer and former actor who left her life in the city to live off the grid. Her debut novel, The Net Beneath Us, won the Edna Ferber Fiction Book Award and her second novel, A Winter’s Rime, received a 2024 WLA Award for outstanding achievement in fiction. Her essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times, Brevity, Lit Hub, and on Wisconsin Public Radio. She writes from a solar-powered office on the second floor of a water tower where she lives in the woods with her husband, two kids, and a Great Pyrenees Mountain Dog.