Bøger af Laird Hunt

From National Book Award Finalist Laird Hunt, a masterful collection of interwoven stories capturing one summer's day in Reagan-era Indiana.Candy Wilson has forgotten to buy the paprika. Turner Davis needs to get his zinnias in. Della Dorner told her mother she was going to Milky Freeze, but that's not where she's really headed on her new Schwinn five-speed. Float Up, Sing Down is the story of a single day. But in that day, how much teeming life! The residents of this rural town have their routines, their preferences, their joys, grudges, and regrets. The old-timers savor past triumphs, cast back to lives circumscribed and defined by the World Wars, wonder what might have been. Youngsters covet cars, karate moves, kissing; they writhe in the first blushes of love or pain or independence. Gossip is paramount. Lives are entwined. Retired sheriffs climb corn bins and muse on lost love, French teachers throw firecrackers out of barn windows, and teenagers borrow motorcycles to ride the back roads.Each of the fourteen stories of Float Up, Sing Down follows one character's 'day-in-the-life' in one of Hunt's most beloved and enduring landscapes. As the book unfolds these lives echo and glance off of one another with elegance and warmth, a tenderness born of strength. In the tradition of Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, Elizabeth Strout, and Edward P. Jones, this is a symphony of souls, a masterful portrait of both loneliness and community by one of our great limners of American experience.

"Haunting essays from acclaimed author Laird Hunt balance intimate remembrance with an examination of the writing life. In this new collection of nonfiction from the celebrated author of Zorrie, Laird Hunt uses fiction as an inspiration, a tool, even an obsession, employing its methods to get to the heart of experience. The "sizzling" work of Jane Bowles colors his wanderings through Palermo, while a London museum trip provokes a consideration of taxidermy's storytelling potential, and fairytales blend with echoes of W. G. Sebald, Willa Cather, and Lâaszlâo Krasznahorkai. From intrigue at the United Nations to a broken-down car in Nebraska, from the history of denim to the dangerous games of childhood, This Wide Terraqueous World leads readers down the winding paths of memory as Hunt examines his subjects in razor-sharp prose both eerily spare and richly evocative"--

Since Coffee House originally published Indiana, Indiana in 2003, Laird has published a number of critically and commercially successful books, including Zorrie, which was a finalist for 2021’s National Book Award for Fiction. Indiana, Indiana takes place in the same world as Zorrie, with overlapping characters and interlocking plot elements. The paperback edition of Zorrie will be published by Bloomsbury in May 2022.

It is mature, accomplished, impressive.' HILARY MANTEL`You can't tell me you haven't heard.'`Heard what?'`About the lynching over in Marvel.'`The what?'Meet Ottie Lee Henshaw.

A ';profoundly imaginative, strikingly original, deeply moving' antebellum tale of two slave girls who take their white mistress into captivity (Kirkus Reviews). In ';a novel that upends what we expect from slavery narratives,' teenage Ginny marries Linus Lancaster, her mother's second cousin, and moves to his Kentucky pig farm ninety miles from nowhere (Roxane Gay). In the shadows of the lush Kentucky landscape, Ginny discovers the empty promises of Lancaster's paradisea place where the charms of her husband fall away to reveal a troubled man and cruel slave owner. Ginny befriends the young slaves Cleome and Zinnia who work at the farmuntil Lancaster's attentions turn to them, and she finds herself torn between her husband and her only companions. The events that follow Lancaster's death change all three women for life. Haunting, chilling, and suspenseful, Kind One is a powerful tale of redemption and human endurance in antebellum America, ';as devastating a piece of writing as anything one is likely to find in contemporary literature' (Contemporary Review of Fiction). ';This compact but reverberant 19th-century tale tracks a circle of hard-luck souls whose collective tears could fill a dry well.... Hunt passes the narration among the principle characters in woozily nonlinear fashion, lending a range of textures to this antebellum melodrama.' New York Times Book Review ';Opening with a prologue in the form of an extraordinarily beautiful meditation on loss, Hunt's writing deepens into allegory, symbolism and metaphor, all while spinning forth a dark tale of abuse, incest, and corruption reminiscent of Faulkner.' Kirkus Reviews (starred review) ';An unforgettable tale of the savagery of antebellum America.... Hunt deftly maintains an unsettling tone and a compelling narrative that will linger with readers long after the last page.' Publishers Weekly