Switchgrass Books – serie

During a deadly Chicago heat wave that's claiming hundreds of lives, Robert, who's stuck in his apartment alone, fears he's going to be the next victim. In the apartment above him lives a shell-shocked Vietnam veteran who talks obsessively about the corpses of his war experience while alternately listening to Die Meistersinger and Madama Butterfly. One day, Robert ventures forth into the searing heat to gas up his car. Immediately he encounters enigmatic Lucy who is trying to escape her brutal fiancé, Matthew Gliss. On a whim, Lucy invites Robert to her apartment where she shows him her mysterious tattoo and tells him of her dangerous life with Matthew Gliss. She warns Robert that if Matthew ever catches them together he should run, not walk, because Matthew won't think twice of killing him. So begins the risky, short-lived relationship that leads to a chilling climax. Each of Robert's increasingly hallucinatory recollections of what happened during the heat wave leads him to profoundly question his own culpability.

This Sherwood Anderson award-winning farcical novel follows two teenage boys living on a farm in rural Indiana. Their father—a diminutive man and the laughingstock of their small town—purchases two boars in an attempt to impress his neighbors and demonstrate, by proxy, his masculinity. The boars, however, turn out to be resolutely gay and deeply committed to each other, setting off a ridiculous chain of events that brings the spotlight and accompanying media circus to Malloy. In the midst of all of the madness is the boys' ongoing, and at once heartbreaking and hilarious, quest to find their wayward mother through a series of touching and humorous flashbacks. Disappointed in their pitiful father, the boys cling to an unrealistic fantasy of their mother, who is in actuality a promiscuous drifter. Crandell's depiction of the gay boars provides much of the book's humor and, unexpectedly, its moral compass as he weaves significant and subtly articulated themes of animal rights and gay rights. The Peculiar Boars of Malloy captures the best traditions of American satire, while turning the conventions of the coming-of-age novel on its head. Crandell's heart and humor will be appreciated by lovers of satire and animals and those readers possessed of a uniquely Midwestern sense of the ridiculous.

Epic and nonlinear in nature, A Good High Place chronicles the lives of two women—Luella and Kachina—who, like the orbit of the sun and the moon, both attract and repel each other. Luella's suspicion that her younger sister—who supposedly died at birth—is being raised as the sister of Kachina sets her on a path of self-discovery that generates more questions than answers. The Native American Kachina is an enigma, a person with a special healing touch who, it is rumored, never ages, leaves no footprints, and might never die. Her goal is to help her people, the Anishinaabek, remain on the Red Path and resist being absorbed by white culture. To do this, she takes guidance from what she refers to as The Day, guidance Luella assumes can be "nothing less than the murmured confidences of God pouring from the sky." Ultimately, Kachina and Luella find friendship among the conflicts of culture, duty, and even loving the same man. Set during the years prior to World War I in Elk Rapids, Michigan, A Good High Place addresses familial struggles and those of a nation moving inexorably toward the age of the automobile. The sometimes painful adaptations of a faster-paced age are embodied, in part, in the struggles of Luella's father who, already troubled by the death of his wife, wrestles with the realization that his livelihood as a steamboat captain is becoming obsolete.

On April 19, 1995, a truck bomb exploded just outside of Oklahoma City's Murrah Federal Building, killing 168 people. Within a matter of hours, the FBI launched the largest manhunt in U.S. history, identifying the suspects as Timothy James McVeigh and John Doe No. 2, a stocky twentysomething with a distinctive tattoo on his left arm. Eventually the FBI retracted the elusive mystery man as a bombing suspect altogether, proclaiming that McVeigh had acted alone and that John Doe No. 2 was the byproduct of unreliable eyewitness testimony in the wake of the attack. Womack recreates the events that led up to this fateful day from the perspective of John Doe No. 2—or JD, as he is referred to in the book. With his ironic and curiously detached persona, JD narrates—from a second-person point of view—his secret life with McVeigh, Terry Nichols, and others in America's militia culture as McVeigh and JD crisscross the Midwest in McVeigh's beloved Chevy Geo Spectrum. John Doe No. 2 and the Dreamland Motel is the tragicomic account of McVeigh's last desperate months of freedom as he prepared to unleash one of the deadliest acts of domestic terrorism in the nation's history. Womack's novel traces one man's downward spiral toward the act of evil that will brand his name in infamy and another's desperate hope to save his friend's soul before it's too late.

This sprawling, footnoted, comedic epic centers around Vonn Carp, who travels to his hometown of Columbus, Ohio, for a funeral. He is returning disgraced and destitute, when, after a long and productive career in higher education, he was discovered to have falsified his academic credentials 20 years prior. Recently divorced and suddenly unemployable, he reluctantly agrees to join his father, Milt, in what he considers an iffy business venture—Dollarapalooza, a family-owned dollar store. For Milt the shop is the fulfillment of a lifelong dream for old-fashioned mercantilism, a "general" store. The store falls on hard times when a massive, big box "Wow-Mart" opens across the street and after a nearly tragic armed robbery in his store, Milt disappears. To the surprise and chagrin of the Carp family, Vonn insists on re-opening Dollarapalooza. Along with the store's eccentric staff, Vonn fashions an alternative business model aiming to make a difference in people's lives "one dollar at a time." For just one dollar, Vonn will answer anybody's question on any topic, and the citizens of Columbus come to him seeking his opinions on subjects like love, celibacy, anthropology, metaphysics, the Internet, and the true meaning of value. Through his interactions with the store's staff and customers, he conceives a new way of life with a changed outlook and a restored sense of purpose.

Lavished with praise at the time of its 1925 publication, Leonard Cline's phantasmagoric God Head is being republished so a new generation of readers can marvel at its dark magic. Cline's mesmerizing debut follows the journey of Paulus Kempf, a fugitive labor agitator who takes refuge with a colony of Finns on the remote shores of Lake Superior in the upper peninsula of Michigan. Kempf, a former surgeon, poet, writer, sculptor, and hyper-intellectual, is at first deeply impressed by the folklore and traditions of the quiet, gentle Finns, not to mention their generosity and hospitality. But he soon begins to play upon their superstitions and exploits their kindness through the power of his cunning and imagination, manipulating them into seeing him as a kind of a god.As Cline's novel hurtles toward its unforgettable climax, Kempf's capacity for compassion or mercy swiftly falls to the wayside as he seduces his host's wife and then murders the man in cold blood. Soon thereafter he carves a giant God Head into the side of a nearby mountainside, which the villagers look upon with awe and fear, held in the thrall of Kempf's mysterious intimations of its malicious power. Having achieved complete domination over the Finns, Kempf ultimately tires of their gullibility and returns to civilization, his quest for self-mastery complete.God Head's descent into the dark void of the human heart will thrill modern readers who are sure to cherish this lost literary artifact from the shadow canon of American fiction.

Doug Crandell is a maestro in multiple genres: the author of critically-acclaimed true crime books, devilishly charming memoirs, and tragicomic works of fiction about small-town life that are leavened in equal measure with poignancy and humor.Enter They're Calling You Home, Crandell's latest novel. This is the story of Gabriel Burke, a writer who is alienated from everyone he loves for exposing a discomforting family secret in a bestselling memoir. Divorced from his wife, estranged from his daughter, and loathed by his alcoholic brother, Burke must confront all of them when he returns to his hometown in Smallwood, Indiana to chronicle the story of a gruesome mass murder there.Thus begins this intricately woven tale of redemption and forgiveness, of men paying the wages of masculinity, of sons coming to grips with the sins of their fathers, and of one writer grappling with the burdens of journalistic integrity. Throughout this deftly crafted work, secrets present a hall of mirrors through which Burke must constantly navigate: the secret of his father's sex crimes, the furtive steps his family takes to deny them, and the surreptitious efforts of State and local officials as they try and cover up the murder case he's investigating. Part road trip, part who-dunnit, part voyage of self discovery, Crandell's moving novel is ultimately the story of a journey in which the only possible destination is its starting point—home.

Balladeer of the city's broken and forgotten men, Joseph G. Peterson looks for inspiration in urban side streets and alleys, where crooked schemes are hatched, where lives end violently, and where pretty much everyone is up to no good. Depicting the lives of people who have woefully lost their way in the world—criminals and victims, the unemployed and unemployable, the neglected and the indigent, the lonely and the alone—Peterson nonetheless brings a poet's touch to his work, which is redolent with allegory, allusion, and Nabokovian wordplay. His last novel, Beautiful Piece, garnered praise from across the literary spectrum. Enter Wanted: Elevator Man, his powerful and ambitious new novel and the story of Eliot Barnes Jr., a man at the end of his proverbial rope.Haunted by the larger-than-life shadow of his father, a scientist who may have helped develop the atomic bomb, twenty-nine-year-old Eliot Barnes, Jr., is an apple that's fallen far from the tree. Saddled with a useless degree in literature, caged in a rundown apartment he can't afford, and embittered by his failure to live up to the future's promise, Barnes, who dreams of a corner office—an aerie roost high above the city, working with the higher-ups—begrudgingly accepts a job as an elevator man in a downtown Chicago skyscraper. Thus begins a profound but comedic meditation on failure in this life, how one comes to terms with not achieving one's dreams, the nature and origin of such dreams, and, fittingly, the meaning of the American dream itself.As unflinching as Nelson Algren and as romantic as Saul Bellow, Peterson's novel boasts wildly surreal plot twists and a lethal wit that frequently erupts into full-on hilarity. Wanted: Elevator Man is the perfect tale for learning to cope with diminished expectations in these dark and desperate times.

In Neom the laws of physics are lax and everyone still gets high. The city squares do it so they can keep working non-stop. The hipsters do it so they can accept things as they are and not how they want them to be. And for a thousand years, Alison has done it to cope with the burdens of immortality. If you can't die, she says, at least you can be as stoned as the living dead.So begins The Blue Kind, a dystopian drug-fantasy that unfolds in the apocalyptic debris of an all but unrecognizable American city. In the wake of Drug War II, all the soldiers have become dealers and all the women have become collateral for the intoxicants they both peddle and pop like Skittles. But a powerful new drug is rumored to top them all, one that will fix everything wrong with Alison's life, but one that is cooked and sold by her fiercest adversary: a dealer who threatens to destroy her entire world.Brimming with a rich and labyrinth plot, indelible characters, and an unforgettable ending, The Blue Kind is as wild a ride as they come: a free-wheeling read about the cycle of addiction that is, itself, addictive.

It's 1974 in DeKalb County, Illinois and the planets have failed to align for Roy Conlon. Widowed and broke, his eight-year-old son Eric is suddenly a mystery to him. The boy has become aware of a sky awhirl with stars and of the universe outside his small-Midwestern town. And as powerful forces pull Eric away, Roy's efforts to hold onto his son are threatened by weakness, guilt, and his participation in a foolish crime.Enter The Constellations, a novel of the diverging paths of a father and his son, and how each copes with the loss of the woman whose love and guidance held them together. Roy and Eric's parallel journeys take them through a landscape populated by long shot players and kitchen sink philosophers, by ruthless thieves and fierce protectors. A compelling novel of small town America in the shadow of Vietnam and Watergate, Cunningham's spare prose and deftly drawn heroes complete a portrait of our country reminiscent of Mark Richard and Jim Shepard. Scarred, divided, and damaged, his characters represent all of our false promises and failed dreams.

Nancy Zafris is a critically acclaimed writer because of the highly distinctive, piercing intelligence that underlies her works. Her gifts accumulate in a vision that somehow combines just the right amount of irony, subtle humor, and compassion for characters you won't see anywhere else in contemporary fiction. Those characters are emotionally all over the map too: resolute, sympathetic, and indelible-their stories can be laugh-out-loud funny one minute and bittersweet the next.In The Home Jar, Zafris reconfirms herself to be among the keenest observers of the human condition around. This is her first short story collection since the critically acclaimed The People I Know, which won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, and her most famous work, the New York Times notable novel The Metal Shredders. Zafris's very loyal following of readers will herald The Home Jar as a major event in American letters.

With Orphans, Ben Tanzer continues his ongoing literary survey of the twenty-first-century male psyche, yet does so with a newfound twist, contemporary themes set in a world that is anything but. In this dystopian tale of a future Chicago, workers are sent off to sell property on Mars to those who can afford to leave, leaving what's left to those who have little choice but to make do with what's left behind: burnt out neighborhoods, black helicopters policing the streets, flash mobs, the unemployed in their scruffy suits, robots taking the few jobs that remain, and clones who replace those workers who do find work so that a modicum of family stability can be maintained. It is a story about the impact of work on family. How work warps our best intentions. And how everything we think we know about ourselves looks different during a recession.This idea is writ large in the world of Orphans, where recession is all we know, work is only available to the lucky few, and this lucky few not only need to fear being replaced on the job, but in their homes and beds. It is also a story about drugs, surfing, punk music, lost youth, parenting, sex, pop culture as vernacular, and a conscious intersection of Death of a Salesman or Glengarry Glen Ross with the Martian Chronicles.Looking to the genre of science fiction has allowed Tanzer to produce something new and fresh, expanding both his literary horizons, and the potential market for his work. Tanzer also looks to the story of Bartleby the Scrivener with Orphans, and the question of what are we allowed as workers, and expected to be, or do, when work is fraught with desperation. Ultimately, Orphans is intended to be a contemporary story about manhood and what it means in today's world, told from the perspective of work and family, and how any of us manage the parameters that family and work produce; but it's a story told in a futuristic world, where our greatest fears are in fact already realized, because there isn't enough of anything, and we are all too easily replaced.

In his fourth novel Joseph G. Peterson tells the story of Gideon Anderson, a young man alienated from his father and two brothers who have gone into the family business. Unlike them, he receives checks from his rich uncle every month. In exchange for the checks, the uncle asks Gideon to come up with a plan for his life, essentially a blueprint about how he intends to enter the job market. Gideon, who went to a prestigious university, puts his uncle off and spends the money on alcohol, the horses, and a miscellany of useless purchases partly because he doesn't know what to do, partly because he doesn't want to do anything. Gideon then meets a lovely, ambitious woman, Claire, who encourages him to do better with his life and talent. She asks him to come to New York with her where her father can set him up in his firm or bankroll a business venture. Despite his good fortune in love and access to the steady cash-flow provided by his uncle, Gideon, like Melville's character Bartleby the Scrivener "prefers not to" commit either to a career or to Claire. For ten years he just drifts. And then suddenly his uncle dies and Gideon has to make a decision.The novels of Joseph G. Peterson have run a literary gauntlet from searing prose to lyrical poetry; from noir style to full character-driven plots, and his work has drawn comparisons to Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. An incredible eye for detail and taut, lean prose are what readers have come to expect from a Peterson effort, and in this new book they will not be disappointed. Peterson delivers an emotionally engaging parable that will appeal not only to twenty-somethings unwilling or unable to commit and fit in, but also to adult readers who appreciate modern literary fiction and carefully crafted characters.

When Bad Things Happen to Rich People is a novel of social satire, a black comedy set in Chicago in the summer of 1995. The novel's protagonist, Nix Walters, is an adjunct instructor of English at a communications college in the loop with few prospects for advancement. He had become a literary punch line when his novel, touted as the next big literary phenomenon, was universally panned by critics. He and his pregnant wife, Flora, are struggling financially; however, their fortunes change when Nix is asked to ghostwrite the memoirs of publishing magnate Zira Fontaine. While grateful for a lavish author fee, Nix quickly finds his marriage, his career, and his sense of identity threatened as he struggles with a difficult subject, navigates office intrigue of Fontaine's corporation, and faces impending fatherhood. These tensions come to a turbulent climax when a brutal heat wave hits the city. Written in the spirit of great naturalist novelists of the previous century, such as Dreiser, Norris, and Crane, with a black comic twist, Morris's first novel is a study in aspiration and self-deception in the face of unforeseen adversity. Set among the broad lawns of Lake Forest where the domestic staff skim leaves from the pool and the sweltering streets of Chicago's pre-gentrified Wicker Park neighborhood, where children plunge into the raging stream of open fire hydrants, When Bad Things Happen to Rich People is a broad panorama of our current social reality.

In a political culture infused with debates about personal liberties, the role of government, and even the definition of "freedom" itself, Haymaker tells the story of an isolated Michigan town that becomes the flashpoint for some of the principal ideological debates of our day. When a libertarian organization selects the town as its flagship community, hundreds of its members migrate and settle within the town's borders. The resulting clash with local townspeople is violent and impassioned, even as the line that divides the two sides increasingly blurs.The story follows characters on both of these sides: an eccentric millionaire known as The Man in White, who is still viewed as an outsider even after living in Haymaker for thirty years; a policewoman trained in hostage and suicide negotiations who questions raising children in this new environment; a teenage girl devoted to basketball and her desire to leave home, who has a close but complicated relationship with her uncle, a local who fistfights outsiders in an annual challenge; a libertarian PR expert, just hoping to calm the storm; and the town's mayor, who owns a local diner and is raising a baby daughter as her husband becomes tragically unhinged. A town first settled by lumberjacks, prostitutes, and roughnecks, Haymaker's present becomes as volatile as its past.Haymaker is a story about the failure of best intentions and the personal freedom of individuals to do good or to harm. This witty and politically charged novel will certainly appeal to Michiganders and Midwesterners, but will also interest those looking for an entertaining fictional account of a situation that could plausibly play out in one of the many small, remote towns in the country.

Finalist, 2015 Midwest Book Award Chicago Book Review Best Book of 2015 Set in the frozen wasteland of Midwestern academia, The Lost Journals of Sylvia Plath introduces Wilson A. Lavender, father of three, instructor of women's studies, and self-proclaimed genius who is beginning to think he knows nothing about women. He spends much of his time in his office not working on his dissertation, a creative piece titled "The Lost Journals of Sylvia Plath." A sober alcoholic, he also spends much of his time not drinking, until he hooks up with his office mate, Alice Cherry, an undercover stripper who introduces him to "the buffer"—the chemical solution to his woes.Wilson's wife, Katie, is an anxious hippie, genuine earth mother, and recent PhD with no plans other than to read People magazine, eat chocolate, and seduce her young neighbor—a community college student who has built a bar in his garage. Intelligent and funny, Katie is haunted by a violent childhood. Her husband's "tortured genius" both exhausts and amuses her.The Lavenders' stagnant world is roiled when Katie's pregnant sister, January, moves in. Obsessed with her lost love, '80s rocker Stevie Flame, January is on a quest to reconnect with her glittery, big-haired past. A free spirit to the point of using other people's toothbrushes without asking, she drives Wilson crazy. Exploring the landscape of family life, troubled relationships, dreams of the future, and nightmares of the past, Knutsen has conjured a literary gem filled with humor and sorrow, Aqua Net and Scooby-Doo, diapers and benzodiazepines—all the detritus and horror and beauty of modern life.

Imagine a hawk's view of the magnificent bluegrass pastures of Kentucky horse country. Circle around the remnants of a breeding farm, four beautiful horses grazing just beyond the paddock. Inside the ramshackle house, a family is falling apart. Hack, the patriarch breeder and trainer, is aged and blind, and his wife, Louetta, is confined by rheumatoid arthritis. Their daughter, Jewel, struggles to care for them and the horses while dealing with her own home and job—not to mention her lackluster second husband, Eddie, and Carley, her drug-addicted daughter. Many days, Jewel is only sure she loves the horses. But she holds it all together. Until her brother, Cal, shows up again. Jewel already has reason to hate Cal, and when he meets up with Carley, he throws the family into crisis—and gives Jewel reason to pick up a gun. Every family has heartbreaks, failures, a black sheep or two. And some families end in tatters. But some stumble on the secret of survival: if the leader breaks down, others step up and step in. In this lyrical novel, when the inept, the addict, and the ex-con join to weave the family story back together, either the barn will burn to the ground or something bigger than any of them will emerge, shining with hope. Remember My Beauties grows large and wide as it reveals what may save us. For more information, visit lynnehugo.com

Deep in the landlocked heart of the Midwest, the characters in The Spoils are drowning under the weight of masculinity, paralyzed in the grip of things left unsaid. These men are broken and breaking, struggling to reckon with the decisions they've made and those they have yet to face. Set mostly in and around Kansas, the stories in this powerful collection explore how men perform, in their jobs and personal lives, and investigate the gray area between doing what's best for oneself and acting a part to make others happy. A man questions whether he should leave his drug-addicted girlfriend and her son or stay, sacrificing his own well-being to be the boy's father. Fed up with the role of the stooge, a Washington Generals player takes his A-game to the Harlem Globetrotters and has to face the unforeseen consequences. A rookie prison guard sent to procure a death row inmate's final meal commits a small, subversive act of humanity. In a world where the line between right and wrong is constantly shifting, some struggle to do the right thing, while others eschew the line altogether and deal with the sometimes violent repercussions. The Spoils examines these difficult choices and will appeal to readers of literary fiction and short stories, especially readers of fiction based in the Midwest.

We are guilty of actions that make no sense. We perform acts of beauty and acts of ugliness. We give in to hidden ambitions, latent hungers, and clumsy grasps at insight.At the heart of these stories are the rituals—grand and small—in which we humans partake; the peculiar gestures we hope will forge meaning or help us glean some sort of understanding. They may be formally ceremonial and spiritual, like the imposition of ashes in a darkened church. But often they are secular, private, and bizarre. A woman slips her son's old baby tooth into her mouth as he's led away to prison. A girl in a tunnel plays an invisible piano while bombs ravage the city above. A man with a laser machine creates a private galaxy to rekindle lost love. A daughter frantically searches a wax museum for her mother's second self.Set mostly in Michigan, the stories in The Things We Do That Make No Sense are woven through with the power of ritual and glimmer with lush descriptions and poignant dialogue. From both the everyday and the sacred, these characters piece together the strange mosaic of life.