The stories collected in "This Is Not the Tropics" come from the geographic center of a divided nation, and its protagonists evoke a split personality— one half submerged in America’ s own diehard mythology, the other half searching to escape tradition. Together they form a portrait of the Plains that is both quirky and poignant. While the themes in this collection are familiar— love and betrayal, loneliness and regret, the needs of the individual versus the needs of the community— the stories themselves are startling and new. Whether it is the story of an eccentric,...
The stories collected in "This Is Not the Tropics" come from the geographic center of a divided nation, and its protagonists evoke a split personality...
O Pioneers was oh so long ago, and yet Willa Cather's masterpiece has proven to be an enduring template for readers' notions of Nebraska writing. The short stories collected here, so richly various in style, theme, and subject matter, should put an end to any such plain thinking about writing from this anything-but-plain state. Nebraska writers all, the authors explore the Midwest, a vastness of small towns, corn, cattle, football, and family businesses. They also venture far afield, to desolate western lives, crowded urban relationships, poignant couplings, comic families, and the worldly...
O Pioneers was oh so long ago, and yet Willa Cather's masterpiece has proven to be an enduring template for readers' notions of Nebraska writing. The...
A vast, barren landscape or a place of subtle natural beauty; the middle of nowhere or the gateway to the cultural and historical riches of the West; many things to many people and a cipher to many more the great state of Nebraska is by force of circumstances a place of possibilities. What these possibilities are and what they promise are precisely what the writers of The Big Empty tell us.Exploring the state from its rural reaches to its urban engines, from its marvelous ecosystems to its myriad historical and cultural offerings, these narratives evoke Nebraska in all its facets....
A vast, barren landscape or a place of subtle natural beauty; the middle of nowhere or the gateway to the cultural and historical riches of the West; ...
After her life as she knows itends in heartbreak, Mary Rasmussen, a strong-willed and independent young ranch woman living in the Sandhills of western Nebraska, suddenly feels that everything she has believed in God, her instincts, the land itself has failed her. She abandons her cultural and emotional ties, succumbing to circumstances she thinks she is powerless to control. In a rash decision, she marries a conservative, patriarchal preacher who doesn t understand her, the ranching community, or anything beyond his own beliefs. Mary s inner turmoil builds as she comes to appreciate the...
After her life as she knows itends in heartbreak, Mary Rasmussen, a strong-willed and independent young ranch woman living in the Sandhills of western...
The stories collected in This Is Not the Tropics come from the geographic center of a divided nation, and its protagonists evoke a split personality--one half submerged in America's own diehard mythology, the other half searching to escape tradition. Together they form a portrait of the Plains that is both quirky and poignant. While the themes in this collection are familiar--love and betrayal, loneliness and regret, the needs of the individual versus the needs of the community--the tales themselves are startling and new. Whether it is the story of an eccentric out-of-work accordion...
The stories collected in This Is Not the Tropics come from the geographic center of a divided nation, and its protagonists evoke a split per...
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,...
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 wa...
Ladette Randolph understands her life best through the houses she has inhabited. From the isolated farmhouse of her childhood, to the series of houses her family occupied in small towns across Nebraska as her father pursued his dream of becoming a minister, to the equally small houses she lived in as a single mother and graduate student, houses have shaped her understanding of her place in the world and served as touchstones for a life marked by both constancy and endless cycles of change. On September 12, 2001, Randolph and her husband bought a dilapidated farmhouse on twenty acres...
Ladette Randolph understands her life best through the houses she has inhabited. From the isolated farmhouse of her childhood, to the series of houses...
