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...

These characters may be the usual suspects, making the usual mistakes, but their stories are not 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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

McDermot, 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...

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 witha chanteuse, is imprisoned in a stockade and rescued by a Civil War...

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.
Winner of the 2008 Western Heritage Award, Jackalope Dreams plays out against the mythology of...