Before Kickstarter, Bitcoin and PayPal, the disenfranchised had their own alternative bank: the pawnshop. A decent guitar, wedding ring or rifle could collateralize instant cash--no questions asked. In his first novel, Pushcart nominee Stephen Schottenfeld reveals the down-and-dirty business as practiced by Huddy Marr, proprietor of Bluff City Pawn in Memphis, Tenn. Huddy's shop is on seedy Lamar Avenue; with the sketchy liquor store next to him closing and a cash-for-blood bank opening on his other side, it's getting seedier. He wants to move to a bigger and better location ("Pawnshop[s] should be close to bad. Right on the edge of bad. Just a little ahead of bad."), but his older brother owns Bluff City's building and won't let him out of the lease or front the cash for the move. Huddy needs a big score, and he gets one when a longtime customer--a wealthy gun-collector--dies and the widow sells him the whole primo collection.
Bluff City Pawn is Huddy's story, but it's also the story of his two brothers: Joe, who bootstrapped a nice living building high-end suburban houses before the Great Recession, and younger Harlan, who has lived the scattered life of a petty thief and drifter. Schottenfeld's enthralling novel is stuffed with details of the pawn business, a business Huddy feels gives customers who need fast cash an alternative to robbery. But more than that, it is a contemporary story of family, ambition and economic inequality--where a pawnshop is maybe not such a bad alternative to a bank. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kansas.