Flyover Fiction – serie

Falling under the spell of these short stories by O. Henry Award–winning author Thomas Fox Averill, a reader might well wonder: What in the world is ordinary? If there really are "just plain folks" anywhere at all, they'd surely be in the solid Midwestern Kansas of Averill's fiction. And yet the "ordinary" people we meet in these stories lead us into one startling encounter after another with the mystery, the magic, and, yes, the transcendence that even the most mundane life secretly holds. In writing that has been called "lyrical" (New York Times), "compelling" (Kansas City Star), and "voluptuous" (Booklist), Averill explores the relationship between fathers and sons, the dead and the living, the natural and the unnatural. With crystalline clarity he reveals the ordinary and the extraordinary genius of a place, a time, a solitary soul embedded in the minutiae of the everyday: a young boy hunting for a runaway horse; a couple ostracized in their small town; a grieving high school basketball star; a child with a voice purer than a tuning fork; a gay son seeking his father's acceptance; two boys playing bocce with the parish priest for high stakes—the secret of their birth. If there is magic in love, in acceptance, in sorrow and solace in all the usual places, then these stories find that magic with ordinary genius.

Lem Purchase is in California when a call comes in the dead of night: his younger, disturbed brother in Nebraska announces his plans to carry out an act of terrorism targeting the state capitol building in Lincoln. This isn't the first time Lem has had to make a frantic check on Jackson. Nor is it the first time that author Robert Vivian has taken us to the haunted world of the Great Plains. Critics called Vivian's first two books in the Tall Grass Trilogy "lyrical and harrowing" (Sven Birkerts on The Mover of Bones) and "brilliantly written" (Publishers Weekly on Lamb Bright Saviors). In this third and final volume in the trilogy, Vivian weaves the voices of Lem, Jackson, and Lem's estranged wife, Lissa, into an American triptych of longing, remembrance, and innocence—of hopes almost fulfilled and inevitably disappointed—as we race to Jackson's reckoning with history that must have its day.While Jackson hatches yet another plan that rivals the first in madness and ultimately threatens Lem's life, Lem's reflections reveal what, and how much, that life has meant. In Jackson's determination we encounter another view of what matters, as he clings to his apocalyptic notion of the only way in which the country can be reclaimed from its present madness.

"Robert Vivian's prose is lyrical and harrowing—harrowing in the Biblical sense," Sven Birkerts said of The Mover of Bones, the first book in Vivian's Tall Grass Trilogy. That same lyrical power carries this new volume to a place of hard-won hope and redemption at once both spiritual and earthly. Lamb Bright Saviors begins as an apocalyptically inclined itinerant preacher staggers across the Nebraska prairie. With his young assistant, Mady, in tow hauling a wagon stacked with bibles, it's not long before the preacher finds he's come to the final fulfillment of his self-proclaimed life's work: to die in front of a group of strangers. Odd as his own end-of-days might be, the lives and struggles of the strangers attending this deathbed scene are even odder. As the dying preacher unleashes a barrage of hallucinatory ramblings and rantings in the hope of imparting wisdom, each ragtag member of this unlikely congregation must reckon with his or her own dark past. And, through it all, the irrepressible Mady lends the preacher's strange performance a surprising and unforgettable dignity and humor.

In prose as clean and beautiful as the stark prairie setting, The Plain Sense of Things tells the stories of three generations of a western Nebraska family. These tales of sorrow and hope are connected by the sinews of need and flawed love that keep families together. A farm wife struggles to support her children after the death of her second husband; a young woman grapples with the shift from girlhood to motherhood; World War II wreaks havoc on those left behind; and a failing farmstead breaks a family’s heart. Amid hardship and change, these interwoven stories illuminate the resilience and dignity-and the subtle sweetness-of a life lived in clear view of the plain sense of things. Download a Study Guide (PDF).

Kate Riley is not the sort of heroine we meet in most American novels. Self-centered, shape-shifting, driven from one man to another and one city to the next, she is all too real but not at all the loyal and steady homebody of idealized womanhood. When we first encounter her, Kate is about to undergo exploratory brain surgery for a condition she herself has fabricated. Sobered by the gravity of the procedure, she commences a journey of memory that takes us back to the Saskatchewan village where she grew up and to the singular event that altered her forever and irrevocably set the course of her life. From her childhood, in which she was held captive to a mother gone mad, through her adult life, which unfolds as a mesmerizing sequence of men, abandoned children, and perpetual movement, Kate's story is one of desperation and remarkable invention, a strangely American tale, narrated by one of our most original writers.

The two silent Ss of Des Moines beckon twenty-three-year-old Vivette with a sexy finger, a promise. So, in the mid-1990s, she convinces Grandpa Joe-Joe to sell his Buick for twenty dollars, leaves behind her friends, her job at a hip New England bakery, and an affair with a married man, and moves to Iowa. Margaret, who left the same bakery years earlier on her own restless quest, offers pointers from her cautiously settled Nebraska life. In a story of lust and longing, love and loneliness, disappointment and desire stretching from the East Coast to the West, these two pioneering women navigate through secrets, lies, decisions, and compromises shared over pool tables, postcards, and shots of whiskey. Starting up, starting over, slowing down, they crisscross each other's lives like highways on a map, always escaping, flying toward a dreamt future, and trying to avoid the charted course.

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.

There is nothing particularly noteworthy about an Easter turkey. But when the turkey is stark white and appears on Easter Sunday on the doorstep of a Lakota medicine woman and her teenage granddaughter, it is clearly out of the ordinary. Taking turns, Stella and her grandmother, Hazel Latour, tell the story of what follows as the mysterious turkey stirs up discord on the reservation, where some greet it as wakan, holy and sacred because of its coloring and timing, and others dismiss it as inexplicable but unimportant, while a less reputable local healer views it as a clear challenge to his standing. A tour de force of storytelling, The Sacred White Turkey is at once remarkably entertaining, rich with suspense and humor, and deeply philosophical, exploring questions of spirituality and power, abuse and trickery, all within a framework that embraces both Native and Catholic traditions. As the Latours find themselves the target of escalating violence, embroiled in a BIA leasing scandal, and witnesses to a turkey crucifixion, readers will find themselves thoroughly engaged in the unfolding mystery and meaning of the sacred white turkey.

Honor Book, 2011 Nebraska Book Awards, Fiction CategoryForeword Reviews, 2011 Book of the Year, Silver Award, General FictionMcDermot, Nebraska, is a pleasant, scenic western cattle town situated in the Pawnee River valley-just the place for people seeking refuge from their hectic city lives. It is also just the place for those who have made their homes on this haunting prairie since the late nineteenth century. Ideal for both, McDermot means everything to those native inhabitants and something very different to those who are looking for a new life.As the native residents wrestle with the arrival of outsiders, a local journalist uncovers a medical scandal epitomizing the problems facing the divided community. After the death of two men, it falls to the ancient but powerful district attorney to mediate a resolution between the clashing interests of the new and the old West. And the Thurston family, descended from the town’s first citizen, sets out in its own way to fight the forces threatening to destroy it. This is the story of new and old interests colliding, of small western plains towns confronting the forces of “progress.”

The departed men in her life still have plenty to say to Corey. Her father, a legendary rodeo cowboy who punctuated his lifelong pronouncements with a bullet to his head, may be the loudest. But in this story of Montana—a story in which the old West meets the new and tradition has its way with just about everyone—it is Corey's voice we listen to. In this tour-de-force of voices big and small, sure and faltering, hers comes across resonant and clear, directing us to the heart of the matter. Played out against the mythology of the Old West—a powerful amalgam of ranching history, Marlboro Men, and train robbery reenactments—the story of the newly orphaned, spinsterish Corey is a sometimes comical, sometimes poignant tale of coming-of-age a little late. As she tries to recapture an old dream of becoming a painter—of preserving some modicum of true art amid the virtual reality of modern Montana—Corey finds herself figuring in other dramas as well, other, younger lives already at least as lost as her own.

It’s been a year since the body of seventeen-year-old Kelsey Little was found in the river outside Dark Vespers, Nebraska. Although the town may have reached an uneasy equilibrium, those who loved her most have certainly not: Javier Martinez, her troubled ex-boyfriend and the father of the child no one knew she was carrying; Sam and Hank, her parents, whose marriage is coming apart under the pressure of grief and not-knowing; and Ike Parrish, a reclusive eccentric whose clairvoyant “river spells” compel him to come forward with information about Kelsey’s disappearance and death.A prismatic look at the impact of loss on individual lives, Water and Abandon tells the moving and paradoxical story of those brought together by the very thing that tears them apart. Haunted by Kelsey’s death, each struggles with his or her own demons of blame and guilt, despair and fury-until one, in a confusion of pain, grief, and unrequited love, decides to do something dire. As deeply felt as it is finely crafted, the novel confirms Robert Vivian’s place among the most compelling fiction writers of our day.

Life takes a strange turn when Richard Allan Gordon, thirty years old and as white as they come, discovers that, as a result of identity theft, five-year-old Jada Reece Gordon bears his name. The product of a  middle-class Jewish upbringing, Richie finds himself completely in love and lust with Jada’s mother, LaTisha, a twenty-five-year-old African American nursing student, and longs to be a father to her child.  Richie and LaTisha’s story takes place at the intersection of love, race, and identity, as the couple is forced to examine their relationship in light of a terrible event that takes the life of a young black father and catapults their midwestern city into chaos. As riots erupt around them and Richie discovers a secret about his own past that challenges his long-held ideas, he and LaTisha must come to grips with the forces that threaten to tear their relationship apart. A novel that doesn’t shy away from the racism that dwells within the unexamined hearts of so many Americans, Twelfth and Race may shock or outrage some readers, yet its story is ultimately timely, honest, and hopeful.

Early July, and the corn in eastern Nebraska stands ten feet tall; after a near-decade of drought, it seems too good to be true, and everyone is watching the sky for trouble. For the Grebels, whose plots of organic crops trace a modest patchwork among the vast fields of soybeans and corn, trouble arrives from a different quarter in the form of Elsa’s voice on her estranged son’s answering machine: “Your father’s dead. You’ll probably want to come home.” When a tractor accident fells the patriarch of this Mennonite family, the threads holding them together are suddenly drawn taut, singing with the tensions of a lifetime’s worth of love and faith, betrayal and shame. Through the competing voices of those gathered for Haven Grebel’s funeral, acts of loyalty and failures, long-suppressed resentments and a tragic secret are brought to light, expressing a larger, complex truth.

In one hand, Jesse Breedlove holds a bottle of Cuervo Gold—or what's left of it—in the other, the shovel with which he has just unearthed the bones of a small girl buried in the cellar of a Catholic church in Omaha, Nebraska. So begins Breedlove's odyssey across the literal and mythical landscapes of America, bearing the finely articulated body he has uncovered, bones that would neither rest nor, in their restless eloquence, let him remain silent. Through the heart of the United States, this mover of bones encounters people who live on the geographical and emotional margins and who find that his presence and his plight summon their voices. Rumors surface and reports multiply as the lonely, the addicted, the isolated, the damned, the pure of heart, and the holy sane speak. From the dark and distant edges of society, they bear witness—sometimes directly, sometimes obliquely—to what the mover of bones and his burden mean.Defiler, redeemer, sinner, or saint—Breedlove is the stuff myths are made of, and The Mover of Bones, the first of the Tall Grass Trilogy of novels by Robert Vivian, evokes a collective dream of the heartland.

Turning loose a Midwestern species of magical realism on a small, God-haunted town in Kansas, Kellie Wells charms strangeness and wonder from what might be mistaken for "ordinary" life. Here is Martin LeFavor, convinced his father has been nabbed by a solicitous band of aliens in desperate need of skin; Charlotte McCorkle, a vexed visionary who believes she has helped her husband escape the flesh; Zero Loomis, plagued by sacrificial angels, the memory of his father, and a shadowy sexual identity; his sister Rachel, an amateur masseuse determined to settle accounts with the past, in particular with her lovingly violent father; Ruby Tuesday, Rachel's daughter, a budding oracle, the embodiment of possibility and prey to history; and, holding this tilted cosmos together, fifteen-year-old Ivy Engel, who carefully measures the borders of Self, advocates for neighborhood bats, and frets about the health of her friend Duncan, his harrowed body mapped and perhaps ravaged by subcutaneous scars. What happens when the spirit exceeds the limits of the skin? More troubling yet, what happens if it doesn't? These are the questions the inhabitants of What Cheer, Kansas, must finally face as their paths cross and recross in an ever more intriguing—and perhaps liberating—puzzle.

“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.

“It’s not going to kill you,” a mother tells her protesting child. And maybe it won’t, but that doesn’t mean anyone is getting off scot-free. A no-man's-land between exoneration and repercussion, this is the place where the people in Erin Flanagan’s stories live: in events as big as 9/11 and as small as an infatuation with a dog groomer, as meaningful as the birth of a baby and as senseless as a car crash, as unique as a 1980s air band living out dreams for a city in decline and as common as an afterschool job that sucks. These stories accept that we all make mistakes, but it’s what we do in the aftermath that defines us.Sharp-witted and tenderhearted, these are stories in which readers will find people they recognize but never really knew until now.

In writing both rich and evocative, Pamela Carter Joern conjures the small plains town of Reach, Nebraska, where residents are stuck tight in the tension between loneliness and the risks of relationships.With insight, wry humor, and deep compassion, Joern renders a cast of recurring characters engaged in battles public and private, epic and mundane: a husband and wife find themselves the center of a local scandal; a widow yearns for companionship, but on her own terms; a father and son struggle with their broken relationship; a man longs for escape from a community's limited view of love; a boy's misguided attempt to protect his brother results in a senseless tragedy. In the town of Reach, where there is hope and hardship, connections may happen in surprising ways or lie achingly beyond grasp.

Although the characters in these stories may be the usual suspects, making the usual mistakes, their stories are anything but the usual fare. Populated by pretenders, ex-cons, and wannabes who bend the rules, break the law, and risk everything to salvage their own hearts, the twelve stories in The Usual Mistakes conduct readers into a world where betrayal is just a beginning. Deception, infidelity, even death—where a person goes from there is the mainspring of Erin Flanagan's fiction, and in the turns her characters take, we find rare insights: that we are often wedded to one another because of, not in spite of, our flaws and that this paradoxical connection may in fact be cause for hope.An impostor medical assistant and an ex-neo-Nazi, covered head to toe in swastika tattoos; a seemingly oafish but suddenly sympathetic husband and a boorish mother-in-law in need of comforting; a young boy who finds adulthood by learning to forgive—the characters in these stories are by turns inappropriate, outlandish, selfish, and kind and are complicated as only real people are.

In the Nebraska Sandhills, nothing is more sacred than the bond of family and land—and nothing is more capable of causing deep wounds. In Pamela Carter Joern's riveting novel The Floor of the Sky, Toby Jenkins, an aging widow, is on the verge of losing her family's ranch when her granddaughter Lila—a city girl, sixteen and pregnant—shows up for the summer. While facing painful decisions about her future, Lila uncovers festering secrets about her grandmother's past—discoveries that spur Toby to reconsider the ambiguous ties she holds to her embittered sister Gertie, her loyal ranch hand George, her not-so-sympathetic daughter Nola Jean, and ultimately, herself. Propelled by stark realism in breakneck prose, The Floor of the Sky reveals the inner worlds of characters isolated by geography and habit. Set against the sweeping changes in rural America—from the onslaught of corporate agribusiness to the pressures exerted by superstores on small towns—Joern's compelling story bears witness to the fortitude and hard-won wisdom of people whose lives have been forged by devotion to the land.

IrÉne gives the wealthy businessmen what they want, diving headfirst into the filthy river, thinking only of providing for her baby daughter, Marisa, as the men salivate over her soaked body emerging onto the bank. A young boy tries to befriend the reticent younger sister of the town’s cruelest bully, only to discover the family betrayal behind her quiet countenance. Josefa, a young bride, is executed for murdering the man who raped her. Joy Castro’s How Winter Began traces these and other characters as they seek compassion from each other and themselves.Thematically linked by the lives of women, especially Latinas, and their experiences of poverty and violence in a white-dominated, wealth-obsessed culture, How Winter Began is a delicately wrought collection of stories. The question at the heart of this riveting book is how or whether to trust one another after the rupture of betrayal.

2017 Finalist for Literary Fiction, Foreword ReviewsBest Fiction Books of 2017 by Chicago Review of BooksOne of 19 Books You Should Read This September by Chicago Review of BooksThe small plains town of Ingleside, Nebraska, is populated by down-on-their-luck ranchers and new money, ghosts and seers, drugs and greed, the haves and the have-nots. Lives ripple through each other to surprising effect, though the connections fluctuate between divisive gulfs and the most intimate closeness. At the center of this novel is the story of Teensy and his daughter, Luann, who face the loss of their land even as they mourn the death of Luann’s mother. On the other end of the spectrum, some townspeople find enormous wealth when developers begin buying up acreages. When Glory Days-an amusement park-is erected, past and present collide, the attachment to the land is fully severed, and the invading culture ushers in even darker times.In Glory Days Melissa Fraterrigo combines gritty realism with magical elements to paint an arrestingly stark portrait of the painful transitions of twenty-first-century, small-town America. She interweaves a slate of gripping characters to reveal deeper truths about our times and how the new landscape of one culture can be the ruin of another. Read the author's discussion guide.

Music, whether a Debussy Étude or Gram Parsons’s “Hickory Wind,” has been a constant in Ruby Gervais’s life. After Ruby helps fuel a paranoid fervor that spreads like wildfire throughout her rural Montana community, her home life deteriorates. As a sixteen-year-old high school dropout busing tables at the local bar two nights a week, her prospects are uncertain. So when, after her shift one night, the Idaho Rivermen invite her to join their band and head toward fame and fortune, Ruby doesn’t think twice.In Ruby Dreams of Janis Joplin Mary Clearman Blew deftly braids together memories of the past with the present, when the Rivermen have imploded and a severely bruised and disillusioned Ruby returns to her hometown to find everything she ran away from waiting for her. In lyrical yet muscular prose, Blew explores women dealing with the isolation of small towns, the enduring damage done when a community turns against itself, the lasting effects of abuse on the vulnerable, and our capacity to confront the past and heal. Throughout, Ruby Dreams of Janis Joplin is underscored by the music that forms inextricable bonds between Blew’s fascinating characters.

When Richie Thorpe and his ragtag religious band of ex-thieves arrive in the High Plains town of Suborney, Colorado, Tommy Sandor is captivated by the group. It’s the summer of 1980 in the dusty, junkyard town, and the seventeen-year-old is wrestling with the forces shaping America and himself: the Iran hostage crisis, the incoming tide of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, and the political rise of the Christian Right.As Tommy is increasingly drawn to the group, his mother, Connie, grows frantic. She has been hiding the truth from her son, telling him that his father was a saxophonist from New York who never knew he had a child, and is lying low in Suborney to hide from Tommy’s actual father-Richie Thorpe. Connie knows Richie has come for his son, and though she has witnessed Thorpe’s mysterious powers, the desperation to protect her lie, her son, and their life begets a venom with an elemental power that threatens the whole town.

Four years ago Jacob Nassedrine from Boston and Laynie Jackman from Los Angeles came within an inch of getting married before things blew apart. They never expected that fate would hurl them back together in a windblown, isolated house on the plains of South Dakota, but that’s where they end up fighting for the future of their relationship-and for their own emotional survival-amid a minefield of ghosts.After suffering the loss of both their families, they must unite to face the great crises of their lives: grief and guilt over their dead loved ones, low-level but persistent addictions to prescription drugs, the specter of familial violence, and recurrent miscarriages. Together they battle their way through the wilderness of their demons to forge sustainable identities that allow them to create a family.The Leave-Takers is a journey through personal darkness to mutually shared light, set against a starkly beautiful backdrop that leaves nowhere to hide.

For one family living on the very western edge of the Great Plains, life runs parallel to the forces that had always endangered its existence. There was a price to obtain this parallel life, of course, but the family had paid it and for once found a way to survive. They had a little water. They had a little food. They had a little work. They were fine-until they weren’t.Taking place in the span of twenty-four hours, The Front follows a man and his nine-year-old niece as they try to escape the apocalyptic circumstances that have come to their home. Traveling north through outbreaking war, the pair navigate the disintegrating balance between rival powers. As new lines are drawn, the neutral spot their family had come to occupy is no longer recognized by either side, and the only chance for safety is to try to cross the Northern Line.

Winner of the 2022 Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best First NovelIt’s the opening weekend of deer season in Gunthrum, Nebraska, in 1985, and Alma Costagan’s intellectually disabled farmhand, Hal Bullard, has gone hunting with some of the locals, leaving her in a huff. That same weekend, a teenage girl goes missing, and Hal returns with a flimsy story about the blood in his truck and a dent near the headlight. When the situation escalates from that of a missing girl to something more sinister, Alma and her husband are forced to confront what Hal might be capable of, as rumors fly and townspeople see Hal’s violent past in a new light.A drama about the complicated relationships connecting the residents of a small-town farming community, Deer Season explores troubling questions about how far people will go to safeguard the ones they love and what it means to be a family.

Winner of the 2023 Nebraska Book AwardIn 2015, when cyberbullies disrupt her life in Southern California, Vivi Marx decides to cut her cord with the internet and take her life offline for a year. She flees to the one place where she felt safe as a child-with her grandmother in Lincoln, Nebraska. Nevermind that her grandmother is long dead and she doesn’t know anyone else in the state. Even before she meets her new neighbors on Fieldcrest Drive, Vivi knows she’s made a terrible mistake, but every plan she makes to leave is foiled. Despite her efforts to outrun it, trouble follows her to Nebraska, just not in the ways she’d feared. With the help of her neighbors, Willa Cather’s novels, and her own imagination, Vivi finds something she hadn’t known she was searching for.

Toby Jenkins, the oldest surviving member of her family, has opened a summer residence program in the Nebraska Sandhills for the wounded and broken, misfits and dreamers. Besides her guests-a minister on sabbatical and a woman recovering from cancer treatment-Toby is joined by Anita and LuÍs, her hired help; Anita’s brother Gabe; and someone Toby least expected, her nearly estranged daughter, Nola Jean. Mother-daughter tensions, age-old prejudices, and generational divides challenge the members of this disparate community as they bump up against each other. Parallel conflicts occur against the backdrop of a changing rural landscape where history clashes with evolving mores.In this thoughtful and moving novel Pamela Carter Joern probes the complications of family relationships, identity, belonging, and the impact of long-held secrets.