Kim Barnes – författare

A powerful novel of young love and rural isolation from the acclaimed author of In the Wilderness. Thomas Deracotte is just out of medical school, and his pregnant wife, Helen, have their whole future mapped out for them in upper-crust Connecticut. But they are dreamers, and they set out to create their own farm in rural Idaho instead. The fields are in ruins when they arrive, so they hire a farmhand named Manny to help rebuild. But the sudden, frightening birth of their daughter, Elise, tests the young couple, and Manny is called upon to mend this fractured family. An extraordinary story of hope and idealism, A Country Called Home is a testament to the power of family—the family we are born to and the family we create.From the Trade Paperback edition.

Poet Kim Barnes grew up in northern Idaho, in the isolated camps where her father worked as a logger and her mother made a modest but comfortable home for her husband and two children. Their lives were short on material wealth, but long on the riches of family and friendship, and the great sheltering power of the wilderness. But in the mid-1960''s, as automation and a declining economy drove more and more loggers out of the wilderness and into despair, Kim''s father dug in and determined to stay. It was then the family turned fervently toward Pentecostalism. It was then things changed.In the Wilderness is the poet''s own account of a journey toward adulthood against an interior landscape every bit as awesome, as beautiful, and as fraught with hidden peril as the great forest itself. It is a story of how both faith and geography can shape the heart and soul, and of the uncharted territory we all must enter to face our demons. Above all, it is the clear-eyed and moving account of a young woman''s coming of terms with her family, her homeland, her spirituality, and herself.In presenting Kim Barnes the 1995 PENJerard Fund Award for a work-in-progress by an emerging female writer, the panel of judges wrote that "In the Wilderness is far more than a personal memoir," adding that it stands "almost as a cautionary example of the power of good prose to distinguish whatever it touches." Indeed, In the Wilderness is an extraordinary work, courageous, candid, and exquisitely written.From the Trade Paperback edition.

From the author of the critically acclaimed In the Wilderness, comes a riveting new narrative of self-discovery and personal triumph. Hungry for the World is the story of how an intelligent and passionate young woman, yearning for an understanding of the world beyond her insular family life, found her way.On the day of her 1976 high school graduation in Lewiston, Idaho, Kim Barnes decided she could no longer abide the patriarchal domination of family and church. After a disagreement with her father–a logger and fervent adherent to the Pentecostal Christian faith–she gathered her few belongings and struck out on her own. She had no skills and no funds, but she had the courage and psychological sturdiness to make her way, and to eventually survive the influence of a man whose dominance was of a different and more menacing sort. Hungry for the World is a classic story of the search for knowledge and its consequences, both dire and beautiful.From the Trade Paperback edition.

“How could ‘old age’ be a medical diagnosis when I wasn’t even forty?”—Lolly Winston“… if aging is difficult for those of us who were only sometimes cute,” she says, “just imagine how hard it must be for the aging knockouts, the living dolls.” —Rebecca McClanahan“I love sex. I love middle-age sex. I love married sex. I''m almost fifty and I''ve never felt sexier. But damn, it took a long time to get here.” —Ellen Sussman“And who is that woman who looks just like me in the mirror behind the bar? Could she be some evil twin, sitting in a place I’d never go alone, acting like a hanger-on, a groupie?”—Lisa Norris“… even past sixty (perhaps especially past sixty), women like me feel impelled to stick to the myths we have invented for ourselves.”—Annick Smith“Slow down. Don’t be so frenetic. Contemplate on the insights you have gained. Listen to the silence within.” —Bharti Kirchner “The young woman’s body I live inside still, that unforgotten home, is a text. It is engraved with memory …”—Meredith HallA collection of blazingly honest, smart, and often humorous essays on middle age contributed by well-known writers such as Julia Glass, Joyce Maynard, Lolly Winston, Antonya Nelson, Diana Abu-Jaber, Judy Blunt, Lauren Slater, and other voices of the baby boom generation.In the tradition of the bestselling A Bitch in the House, Kiss Tomorrow Hello brings together the experiences and reflections of women as they embark on a new stage of life. Many women in their forties, fifties, and sixties discover that they are racing uphill, trying desperately to keep their romantic and social lives afloat just as those things they believe constant start to shift: The body begins its inevitable decline, sometimes gracefully, sometimes less so…The twenty-five stellar writers gathered here explore a wide range of concerns, including keeping love (and sex) alive, discovering family secrets, negotiating the demands of illness and infertility, letting children go, making peace with parents, and contemplating plastic surgery. The tales are true, the confessions candid, and the humor infectious—just what you’d expect from the women whose works represent the best writings of their generation. From Lynn Freed’s wry “Happy Birthday to Me” to Pam Houston’s hilarious “Coffee Dates with a Beefcake”; from Ellen Sussman''s "Tearing Up the Sheets" to Julia Glass''s "I Have a Crush on Ted Geisel," Kiss Tomorrow Hello is a wise, lyrical, and sexy look at the pleasures and perils of midlife.