Stardust and Fate: The Blueroad Reader (Blueroad Readers)

Stardust and Fate: The Blueroad Reader is the first volume in a collected series of new writing and art from the road, featuring the works of nearly four dozen established and emerging writers, poets, and printmakers from North America.
The stories, essays, and poems in Stardust and Fate tour some of many routes -- seen and otherwise -- running through people's lives, in real and imagined journeys, literal and figurative, past and present. Pieces include fiction, literary journalism, verse, and memoir: offbeat, quirky, surprising, deep.
Handsomely printed and illustrated with original wood engravings, the collection explores some of the intersections and side roads of landscape, history, people, places, curiosity, wanderlust, memory, moment, chance, and change.
Neither travelogue nor guidebook, Stardust and Fate instead features pieces traversing a range of personal and political territories, where motion drives the narrative and people find themselves facing scenes sometimes unsettled, yet often sublime. In part tribute to William Least Heat Moon's Blue Highways -- where, as he noted, the back roads on the old gas station maps were blue -- these stories and poems seek the unknown while celebrating a quiet restlessness running through us all.

A collection of new writing from the road, Stardust and Fate: The Blueroad Reader features the work of 38 short story writers, essayists, and poets, including Freya Manfred, Robert Bly, Bill Holm, John Calvin Rezmerski, Ron Gower, Nancy Paddock, Richard Robbins, Thomas R. Smith, Candace Black, Joseph Hutchison, Joyce Sutphen, Roger Sheffer, Mark Dewey, Carol Barrett, Ed Higgins, Terry Davis, Bruce Benidt, Joe Paddock, Ann Rosenquist Fee, James P. Lenfestey, Suzanne L. Bunkers, Nick Healy, Graeme McRanor, James Silas Rogers, Rachael Hanel, Ed Micus, Wendy Fernstrum, Pop Wagner, Joe Tougas, Philip Bryant, Lorna Rafness, Nate LeBoutillier, Scott King, Richard A. Coffey, Donna R. Casella, Michael O'Hearn, Ed McManis, and John Gaterud.
Original wood engravings and intaglios by Kent Aldrich; Dale Kennedy; Joel Moline; William Andrew Myers; James Todd; Jim Westergard; and Brad Widness. Cover by Jim Brandenburg.