About the Author

Jen Companik is an author, translator, and photographer based in the exurbs of Chicago. She is a fiction editor at TriQuarterly and holds an M.A. from Northwestern University. Some of her professional accomplishments include: first prize, The Ledge’s 2014 Fiction Awards; a Pushcart Prize nomination for nonfiction from Border Crossing; and work appearing in: The Evansville Review; The London Reader; The Northern Virginia Review; Fresh Ink Magazine; The Bookends Review; Another Chicago Magazine; Defunkt Magazine; Local Honey Midwest; and Glassworks. She also does literary and legal translations. She feels fortunate to be pursuing her life’s passions.

Reviews

“The eye-catching cover of Check Engine and Other Stories, Jennifer Companik’s debut collection of fiction, is perfectly chosen. Her stories are lit from within by an erotic glow of imagination that delivers on heightening the representation of ordinary life. To my mind, a memorable nude in painting is not an exercise in romance, but in realism, and that is the strength of these stories as well.”

—Stuart Dybek, author of Streets in Their Own Ink & I Sailed with Magellan

“Check Engine and Other Stories is a marvelous amalgam of stories that reveal the complexities of relationships, whether romantic or familial, as well as embraces the flaws we all have inside. Each story has a single thread woven through it that, ultimately, ties them together. Jennifer Companik embraces the backroom secrets, the unsympathetic protagonists, and turns every preconceived notion on its proverbial ear. Jennifer's writing is at times dark, at others whimsical, but at all times this writer leaves you with words you want to return to again and again.”

—Christine Kelly, poet and memoirist

“Read these stories of everyday people trapped by love, anger, the past, others’ failings—and weep while you admire the precision of the language. Jennifer Companik writes about large subjects—hope, despair, ambivalence, revenge, abuse—by limning stories of the everyday. We all need to check our engines and don’t—which is the human condition. Her women find themselves still in the patriarchy, which is going strong after all these years, unabated.”

—S.L. Wisenberg, editor, Another Chicago Magazine

“We would undoubtedly be better, kinder humans if we read more stories like these. Jennifer Companik’s Check Engine and Other Stories reads like a glimpse into the worlds of the strangers we live with. Through the entire collection, I couldn’t shake the feeling that these are the people I’ve seen crying in their cars, and that—maybe—Companik understands why I’ve cried in my own better than I do.”

—Jennifer Walton, Local Honey | Midwest