Nocturnal America
Format:Paperback
Publisher:University of Nebraska Press
Published:1st Nov '13
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
Keeble's stories hinge on love - its difficulty, its loss and pangs, but also its discovery of good fortune.
Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, this collection of tales returns readers to the American Northwest so deftly observed and powerfully evoked in John Keeble’s previous works. Nocturnal America occupies a terrain at once familiar and strange, where homecoming and dislocation can coincide, and families can break apart or hone themselves on the hard edges of daily life.
Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, this collection of tales returns readers to the American Northwest so deftly observed and powerfully evoked in John Keeble’s previous works. Nocturnal America occupies a terrain at once familiar and strange, where homecoming and dislocation can coincide, and families can break apart or hone themselves on the hard edges of daily life. In these stories, Keeble populates what journalist Joel Garreau once called the “Empty Quarter” of North America with complex humanity. Life ranges vibrantly through these airy spaces, at times finding itself thrown up against the shifty terrors of political and cultural change.
Keeble’s stories hinge on love—its difficulty, its loss and pangs, but also its discovery of good fortune. As his characters come and go, unexpectedly converging, vanishing, or reappearing, their stories reach beyond the ordinariness of life.
"John Keeble's beautifully rendered short-story collection, Nocturnal America, examines the power of family, love and place... The author's feel for people and place are key to this outstanding collection." - Sybil Downing, Denver Post "[Nocturnal America is] fiction with characterization as deep and broad as any writer might draw - at times luminous, at times heartbreaking... [T]he University of Nebraska Press proves again its ability to print what deserves to be published... These stories have an edge so sharp it cuts, but they also hold the soft place of a conflicted heart. Writers like Keeble do not often tell us what we want to know, but they do tell us what we fear to know. If Nocturnal America is often dark, Keeble's work also flickers with a distant light." - Bloomsbury Review "Nocturnal America, winner of the 2006 Prairie Schooner Prize for fiction, is a supremely satisfying set of nine loosely connected stories that interweave raw emotion, spiritual searching and violence... Keeble illuminates his characters with uncommon clarity, showing the care of an author who's spent 30 years perfecting his form." - Mary Ann Gwinn, Seattle Times "Writers write about the same 10 things over and over. Love, hate, loyalty, betrayal, innocence, guilt, birth, death, hope, despair... There's nothing new to write about. In the wrong hands, stories can be too familiar. In the right hands, stories show us how we live. John Keeble's hands are the right ones... In issues of craft, Keeble is first-rate." - Ellen Slezak, Los Angeles Times Book Review
ISBN: 9780803271777
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
284 pages