George Choundas

George Choundas (KOON-duss) is a Cuban- and Greek-American, a former FBI agent, and an NEA Creative Writing Fellow. In addition to I Think I’ll Stay Here Forever (winner of the Press 53 Award for Short Fiction), he has published a book of essays, Until All You See Is Sky (winner of the EastOver Prize for Nonfiction), and a book of stories, The Making Sense of Things (winner of the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize). He is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee with work in over seventy-five publications, including The Best Small Fictions. His Greek great-grandfather, a fisherman, was murdered by pirates off Aegina. His Cuban great-grandfather, a lumberjack, was killed by a tree off perpendicular by several accelerating degrees.

Praise for I Think I’ll Stay Here Forever

You know you’re in the hands of a consummate wordsmith. Choundas’s I Think I’ll Stay Here Forever is a funny, touching, and heartwarming collection. Some of these stories are bite-sized, others take you much deeper, but all of them reunite you with the beauty of language and the joy of great storytelling.

—G. K. Wuori, author of HoneyLee’s Girl

Each of George Choundas’s stories is an uncanny marvel of such tightly compressed energy that you feel the pages vibrating in your hands.

—Joan Wickersham, author of No Ship Sets Out to Be a Shipwreck

I Think I’ll Stay Here Forever is a thrillingly meditative and linguistically acrobatic collection of literary delights. Each story plumbs a dark and existential depth, and Choundas’s writing leaves one wide-eyed and drenched in wonder.

—Derek Palacio, author of The Mortifications