Barnstorm: Contemporary Wisconsin Fiction - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0299208540 ISBN 13: 9780299208547

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005

Synopsis

Though the best American writers live everywhere now, a popular fiction persists: our strongest literary voices are strictly bi-coastal ones. Barnstorm sets out to disprove that cliché and to undermine another one as well: the sense of regional fiction as something quaint, slightly regressive, and full of local color. The stories in this collection capture our global reality with a ruthless, unaffected voice. Lorrie Moore's "The Jewish Hunter" is a dark romance that's by turns cynical and guileless. Mack Friedman catches the smoking feel of first love in his "Setting the Lawn on Fire," and Jesse Lee Kercheval's "Brazil" is a raucous, ultimately mournful road trip. For Jane Hamilton, Wisconsin is a gorgeous but bittersweet homecoming, and for Kelly Cherry, in her achingly elegiac "As It Is in Heaven," it's the hopeful new world, juxtaposed with a bleak, tweedy England. Dwight Allen's "The Green Suit" evokes the young man edging toward adulthood, in a New York that's as flamboyant as an opera, and Tenaya Darlington, in her "A Patch of Skin," constructs a pure horror story, because the horror of loneliness is something we all know. Together Barnstorm's eclectic voices suggest that every coast now, even the Great Lakes' shores, are at the very center of our best, and truest, national literature.

Not for sale in the United Kingdom.

About this title

About the Author

Raphael Kadushin is humanities editor at the University of Wisconsin Press, editor of Wonderlands: Good Gay Travel Writing, and a contributing editor at Bon Appétit magazine. He contributes to a wide range of publications—among them National Geographic, National Geographic Traveler, Condé Nast Traveler, Town & Country Travel, and Out Traveler—and his work appears in a variety of collections including Men on Men 5, Best Food Writing 2001, and Through the Lens: National Geographic Best Photographs.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0299208540
• ISBN 13: 9780299208547
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 330
• Editor: Kadushin Raphael