Twelve Below Zero - Softcover

Anthony Bukoski

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0898230721 ISBN 13: 9780898230727

Publisher: New Rivers Pr, 1986

Synopsis

“Mr. Bukoski is a sure-handed, lyrical writer.”—The New York Times Book Review

“I am delighted Anthony Bukoski’s first powerful stories have been reissued in a new, expanded edition. His sometimes fearsome, always eccentric characters are presented by a voice certain of what it has to say.”—W.P. Kinsella, author of Shoeless Joe

When these stories appeared in 1986, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Shirley Ann Grau, writing in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, called them “intriguing, just a bit off beat.” Publishers Weekly found them “appealing.” Twenty-two years later, Anthony Bukoski revisits the backwaters of northern Wisconsin and Minnesota, where those who love deeply end up being hurt. In Two Heart or Superior, Wisconsin, or in Duluth, Minnesota, the lonely find comfort difficult to come by. Having slipped below an emotional freezing point, the heartbroken in these twelve stories do anything for love. Though it might mean taking a water-well driller as a second or third lover or kissing a foul recluse, some lucky hearts find the way to survive in Bukoski’s frozen North.

Anthony Bukoski has published four other story collections, including Time Between Trains (Southern Methodist University Press), a 2003 Booklist Editor’s Choice selection, and North of the Port (Southern Methodist University Press, 2008). National Public Radio’s Selected Shorts program and Wisconsin Public Radio’s Chapter A Day program have both aired readings of Bukoski’s work. A Christopher Isherwood Foundation fellowship winner, the author resides with his wife Elaine in the country outside of Superior, Wisconsin.

About this title

About the Author

Anthony Bukoski is a Polish American short story writers, essayist, critic, and university professor at the University of Wisconsin, Superior. Beginning with the publicaion of Tweleve Below Zero (1986), Bukoski has led a virtual renaissance of Polish American literature written in English by the children and grandchildren of immigrants. He has published four other collections of short stories.

From Publishers Weekly

These short stories set in the frozen North and down-home South are bitter, sarcastic and grotesque, so much so that they create a kind of oddball metaphysic. Bukoski, an assistant English professor at Northwestern State University in Louisiana, brings a sophisticated voice to unsophisticated characters. They are farmers, sawyers, truckers and innkeepers, descendants of Swedish and Polish immigrants. They seem to live in an America unacquainted with Freud and computers, and they hold back little of their searing loneliness, jealousy and loathing. Bukoski's voice is strong and sometimes quirky, but these stories are nonetheless appealing.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: New Rivers Pr
• Publication date: 1986
• ISBN 10: 0898230721
• ISBN 13: 9780898230727
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 126
• Illustrator: Gaylord Schanilec