Terese Svoboda - Böcker

Young Harriet's father sells her as a slave to settle his gambling debt with an eccentric Indian—and her story is just beginning. Part Huck Finn, part True Grit, Harriet's story of her encounter with the dark and brutal history of the American West is a true original. When she escapes the strange mound-building obsession of her Pawnee captor, Harriet sets off on a trek to find her father, only to meet with ever-stranger characters and situations along the way. She befriends a Jewish prairie peddler, escapes with a chanteuse, is imprisoned in a stockade and rescued by a Civil War balloonist, and becomes an accidental shopkeeper and the surrogate mother to an abandoned child, while abetting the escape of runaway slaves. A picaresque in the American vein, Terese Svoboda's new novel is the Bohemian answer to Willa Cather's iconic My Ántonia. Lifting the shadows off an entire era of American history in one brave girl's quest to discover who she is, Bohemian Girl gives full play to Svoboda's prodigious talents for finding the dark and the strange in the sunny American story—and the beauty and the hope in its darkest moments.

In this stunningly original collection of seventeen short stories, Terese Svoboda navigates a terrain of alienation and loss with searing, poetic prose. “I talk like a lady who knows what she wants,” begins the vagrant narrator of the title story. She insists there’s a wild child hiding among the cows in the gully near her home. Others in the trailer park think it’s just herself she’s chasing, but no one helps her sort out the truth—until there’s a murder. Stark and disturbing, “Trailer Girl” is a story of cycles of child abuse and the dream to escape them. In “Psychic” a clairvoyant knows she’s been hired by a murderer, in “Leadership” a tiny spaceship lands between a boy and his parents, in “Lost the Baby” a partying couple forget where they dropped off their baby, and in “White” a grandfather explains to his grandson how a family is like a collection of chicken parts. Frequently violent, always passionate, these often short short stories are not the condensed versions of longer works but are full-strength, as strong and precise as poetry. Watch the Trailer Girl book trailer on YouTube.

“This is God,” the novel begins, and we are spinning on our way into the heart of a Midwest that spans spirits and centuries and forever redefines the middle of nowhere.Whispers plague a desperate conquistador lost in tall prairie grass. Four hundred years later, a male go-go dancer flings a bag of dope into the same field. God, in the person of a perm-giving, sheetcake-baking Nebraska farm woman, casts a jaundiced yet merciful eye over the unfolding chaos. Fire and a pair of judiciously applied pantyhose bring the two stories together. A contemplation of divinity and drugs on the ground, Tin God is a funny yet poignant, time-shifting story of the plains that transcends its interstate spine and exposes us to a whole new level of Terese Svoboda’s fiery prose.

All of the medical, technological, and psychological advances of the twentieth century challenge “mere mortals” in Terese Svoboda’s third book of poetry. In “Faust,” a mini-epic in five acts, the eponymous character of literary legend appears in the form of a woman, who redefines what being mortal means in light of the politics of the Third World, and gender. In contrast “Ptolemy’s Rules for High School Reunions” explores what happens when you do without a pact with the devil. The gods—Greek and otherwise—also make appearances as a TV announcer in “Philomela,” in the basement with the plumber in “The Smell of Burning Pennies,” and in the dyslexic confusion between “Dog/God.” But it is not only the divine that charges the poems in Mere Mortals—sex also suffuses and reinvents key relationships. Readers of such wittily probing poems as “The Root of Father is Fat” and “Brassiere: Prison or Showcase?” will know why Philip Levine has described Svoboda as “one light-year from being the polite, loverly, workshop poet. Mere Mortals poems first appeared in such magazines as the New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, Paris Review, and the American Poetry Review.

These are poems of family, of romantic hope and disappointment, of parenthood, and of grief that move from a childhood in Nebraska in which a father strides into a ripe wheat field; to the parks and parking lots of New York City, the interchangeable landscapes of suburban America, and the more sensual environment of secluded water; to little traveled parts of Africa and the Pacific where our customs and passions are refracted into shapes that are sometimes beautiful, sometimes grotesque.Terese Svoboda writes of a world in which the reassuring simplicity remembered from childhood is difficult to recover. Outside of this vision of the past, all present life seems an aberration—an existence where violence can supplant love, families break apart, a child dies.All Aberration received a starred review in Publishers Weekly, a lead in Contemporary Poetry 1986 and a Notable Book nomination by the American Library Association. It was written during stays at Yaddo, MacDowell and Ossabaw, and received the benefit of a Creative Artists Public Service grant in 1982. Its poems first appeared in such magazines as Harper’s, The Nation, Paris Review, and Ploughshares.

Out of a Shakespearean-wild Midwest dust storm, a man rises. “Just a glimpse of him,” says his sister; “every inch of him,” says his guilt-filled lover. “Close your eyes,” says his nephew. “What about it?” asks his father. The cupboard is filled with lime Jell-O, and there are aliens, deadly kissing, and a restless, alcoholic mother who carries a gun. “Every family is this normal,” insists the narrator. “Whoever noticed my brother, with a family as normal as this?” the beleaguered sister asks. Against the smoky prairie horizon and despite his seizures, a brother builds a life. Imbued with melancholy cheer, Dog on Fire unfolds around a family’s turmoil, past loves, and a mysterious death.

A runaway circus lion haunts a small town where two lovers risk more than their respective marriages. A junket to Cuba and an ambassador’s dalliance with a niece hide dark secrets and political revolution. “I’ve always had a knife,” says the unstable stepson to his parents. Inventive, dark, and absurd, the stories in The Long Swim capture Terese Svoboda’s clear-eyed, wry angle on the world: a place of violence and uncertainty but also wild beauty, adventure, and love both lasting and ephemeral. Her characters strive for escape—through romance, travel, or more self-destructive pursuits—and collide with the constraints of family and home, their longing for freedom and autonomy often at odds with the desire for safety and harmony. Cynical, irreverent, and formally daring, Svoboda’s stories in The Long Swim are a deft exploration of womanhood and humanity. Waves of provocation and wonder toss the reader and leave them wanting more.

Hitler and My Mother-in-Law is a riveting memoir that explores the intersection of truth—both familial and political—through the colorful and complex life of the author's mother-in-law. In a time like our own of intense propaganda and manipulation, the only WWII female correspondent who covered both theaters of war, Pat Hartwell identified Hitler from a pile of ashes for the US military, and the troops awarded her with a million-dollar painting from Hitler's study. Really?She was the only woman in the CBS news room, assistant to the head of the Office of War Information, VP of one of the largest public relations companies in the world, third in command of UNICEF where she convinced Matisse to provide artwork for free, editor of her own Arizona newspaper where she hustled naïve art on the side, and eventually head of the Hawai’ian arts council, a state of extremely complex political and social stakeholders, where she left a legacy of preventing art fraud. Her story is a fascinating journey through history, art, and deception.The memoir delves into the art of invention and the shapeshifting of memory and truth, interwoven with humorous yet profound moments. It examines the comical Soviet efforts to conceal Hitler's death, McCarthy's investigations, and the author's own struggle to compete with both her mother and her mother-in-law. Threaded throughout are insights into organizations that malign the word "mother" and, of course, plenty of mother-in-law jokes.With meticulous research and a unique perspective, Hitler and My Mother-in-Law challenges the boundaries of narrative honesty, offering a powerful exploration of propaganda, identity, and the personal reckoning that defines the art of memoir. It's a gripping mix of history, family, humor, and a biting reflection on the politics of truth—past and present.