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Maximum Speed
Kevin Clouther
Like Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad and Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Kevin Clouther’s Maximum Speed moves across time and point of view to dramatize youth’s aftershocks. The unifying presence in three characters’ lives is Billy, an apprentice drug dealer in South Florida. His improbable appearance twenty years after his death reconnects Nick, Andrea, and Jim with each other and with the shared secret of their past.
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Voices from the Plains, Vol. 3
Julie Hasse ED. and Kevin Clouther
This third installment in the Voices from the Plains anthology series features more amazing creative writing from Nebraska authors. The anthology includes poetry, short stories, excerpts from novels, memoirs, and more. You might be surprised what Nebraska authors have to offer in this eclectic collection.
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We Were Flying to Chicago
Kevin Clouther
In this striking debut collection, characters find unexpected moments of profound insight while navigating the monotony of daily life. Here we find a man who drives to the wrong mountain, a hubcap cleaner who moonlights as a karaoke star, and a deliveryman whose urgent letters have no willing recipient. While lulled by the deceptively simple rhythm of the ordinary, Kevin Clouther offers the instant before momentous change—the view over the cliff, the intake of breath before a decision, a glimpse of stark vulnerability, of faith and hope.
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Blind Uncle Night
Art Homer
Wide-open spaces in the natural world: this is the world of Art Homer's poetry in Blind Uncle Night, with physical solidity, sweeping vistas, and expansive emotion, rendered with taut, sinewed craft.
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The Music Box Treaty
Richard Duggin
The Music Box Treaty chronicles the life of Marion Monaghan, a former college professor from the East, who has fled to the tiny Sandhills village of Lodgepole, a settlement in the "bellybutton of the country." It's Marion's hope to recreate himself in the simpler life of the existential Hemingway hero--with the belief that truth and beauty lies in the tales we tell about ourselves.
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Why Won’t You Talk To Me?
Richard Duggin
Here are 9 poignant tales about the leavers and the left, the deceivers and the deceived, those searching and those sought after in the human heart's often painful and always conflicted hunt for love. These stories have been selected from among the many Richard Duggin has published in literary venues over the years, and they share in subject and theme our common struggle to communicate one to another what our deepest emotions have no language to express.
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You Who Make the Sky Bend: Saints as Archetypes of the Human Condition
Lisa K. Sandlin
Most saints began as children, as all humans do. Martin de Porres’ white father abandoned him; Dymphna fled an incestuous father. Rosa de Lima threw her mother into despair. Brendan built a boat from leather and butter; Francis of Assisi talked to animals. Teresa de Ávila wielded a wry sense of humor, and Catherine of Alexandria argued fifty master philosophers into cowering silence.
A few, though, did not know childhood or death. Archangel Michael’s name was a battle cry; shining Gabriel calmed the terrified before delivering his messages. Desperate for the powers associated with Librada (relief from bad husbands and boyfriends) and Expeditus (exceedingly swift help), people conjured these saints from relic and desire.
You Who Make The Sky Bend relates the saints to stages of the human condition, thus placing them into the wheel of life. For they touch lives. The saints remain on call, as if their form is a kind of ethereal transmitter tube lit by their filament souls. Many people talk to them, daily, weekly, or on the unforeseen morning when misfortune pushes past their threshold. And many people believe they are heard—by the saint, their better selves, their own hearts.
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Sky Harbor
Miles Waggener
"One might slip into a cave without a torch and imagine a language of foot scuttle and wing whinny, imagine that one must make from these consonants and vowels a lyric, a metaphysics-such is the poetry of Miles Waggener-hermetic, intentional, and of great necessity."-SANDRA ALCOSSER, Author of A Fish to Feed All Hunger and Except by Nature"'Sky Harbor' is the name of Phoenix, Arizona's international airport, through whose automatic sliding doors-at one point in this fabulous collection of the same name-a sparrow flies. The human-constructed and the unconstructed abut constantly in Miles Waggener's second full-length collection, wherein collisions between desert landscape and air-conditioned condominium developments form a stimulating dynamic, and an indelible backdrop on which the poet's major concerns-memory, the land's impression on the psyche, logos, spiritual longing-unfold, to distinct and brilliant consequence. When all the clique-ish whisperings cease, we will come to poetry like Miles Waggener's Sky Harbor to regain a sense of what the genre can truly do. Rigorous and rewarding, brimful of craft and passion, this book emanates from a place-in the physical landscape and in the landscape of the mind-that is both longed for and exquisitely evoked. These poems shine the reader 'through the lock's narrow way.'"-CHRIS DOMBROWSKI, Author of By Cold Water"Enter an earth dark with portents, some of which we have created ourselves: bird dead from a boy's rock, fetus unable to come to term. In this uncannily orchestrated book of poems, the earth, our familiar, is given back to us strange, a landscape caught between the violence of the past and impending apocalypse, where we, as humans, exist between danger and domain. Miles Waggener has written a narrative of last days in a language that staggers, turning corners, sometimes perilously, in a search for doors, gates, horizons which will open, 'the last-ditch efforts in the inclement that you, that your children become.' Read this book slowly; it is as breathtaking and suspenseful as our time here."-MELISSA KWASNY, Author of The Nine Senses
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Falling In Love with Natassia
Anna Monardo
Mary and Ross were in Rome on a junior-year-abroad program when they had their baby, Natassia, who was conceived on a dare: “Do it with no birth control,” another couple had challenged. “We’ll do it if you do it . . .”
Mary and Ross are unmarried, ambitious, and way too young, and though smitten with their daughter, they eventually—and with regret—abdicate responsibility to Ross’s parents, who raise Natassia in the intellectually stimulating (and seemingly loving) atmosphere of their Manhattan apartment. Fifteen years later, 1989, Natassia is an honors student and a violin player. Despite the absence of her mother, a world-class modern dancer who survives by living in the moment, and her father, a physician in the Pacific Northwest, Natassia is thriving—until her mysterious romance with a man she will not identify derails her so profoundly that her parents, grandparents, and even her godparents, Nora and Christopher, must come together to save her. A dancer, a doctor, two book editors, a painter and a psychotherapist—all are forced to turn away from and also draw upon the creative and intellectual endeavors that consume and define them. Struggling to buoy Natassia, her guardians sink along with her into the deepest darkness.
Mary, a Korean war orphan, must learn from step one how to provide the mother love she herself never received; indeed, the daughter's breakdown sparks the mother's coming-of-age. Ross, still in love with Mary after ten years’ separation, must face the consequences of his obsessions. And Nora and Christopher, burdened by a decades-old secret, use desperate measures to save Natassia—and their marriage.
Within the intimate universe of one unorthodox family, Falling in Love with Natassia explores the blurred lines between love that heals and sex that harms. These characters will shock you with how forcefully their hurt hearts demand restitution; they will mystify you with the paths they choose as they move toward recovery and redemption.
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Sight is No Carpenter
Art Homer
From the rural center of the Plains States, Nebraska, comes the graceful formal voice of Art Homer. Homer's poetry is an understated witness to experiences both stark and beautiful; his lines are always buiding, always making.
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In the River Province
Lisa K. Sandlin
Lisa Sandlin's third collection of short fiction centers on the daily lives of characters in northern New Mexico who interact with saints literally or metaphorically. Several stories take place on the annual Good Friday walk to the Santuario de Chimayo and incorporate traditional elements of pilgrimage: storytelling and chance.
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Phoenix Suites
Miles Waggener
The desert of the Southwest is the heartland of this poet's meditations on time, civilizations, and the heart's painful lessons. Waggener wields language like a magician, language that excites, exults and leads to discoveries about ourselves and our relationship to the desert.
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Message to the Nurse of Dreams: A Collection of Short Fiction
Lisa K. Sandlin
A white high school girl tinkers with the invisible pieces of her life while the black disc jockey says, "This one is dedicated to all you blue-eyed soul sisters out there, hiding what the good Lord gave you. Move into it, babies."
Message to the Nurse of Deams is about growing up in the late 60s in a Texas oil town soaked by Gulf winds, where every kid was one generation removed from the country - a time when black and white got mixed together, half-grown, half children, trying to decide if they were as different as they'd been led to believe all their lives.
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The Famous Thing About Death
Lisa K. Sandlin
"These are wonderful stories—passionate, fierce, reckless, and scrupulously written... Sandlin's characters are flawed and broken people, but their stories are not a lament. They're about the power to create beauty and healing from loneliness and pain."—Rick DeMarinis
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The Drownt Boy: An Ozark Tale
Art Homer
It had been many years since Art Homer had spent time in the region where he grew up as the child of subsistence farmers. In this beautifully written true tale, Homer returns to the Missouri Ozarks with his stepson, Reese, for a three-day canoe trip down the recently flooded Current River. As rain threatens to erupt again and the two prepare for their uncertain trip down the swollen river, a man in a straw hat pulls up to them on the gravel bar. "Did they find that drownt boy yet?" he calls. So begins an extraordinary trip down a dangerous river, toward unforeseen adventures and into the swirling recesses of memory.
As they float past dense, dark woods, Homer recalls the magic of nature in his childhood. Against a backdrop of rural poverty, Homer shows the richness of the land in the inner life of a child, from frosty blue-bellied lizards and doodlebugs to the timeless lure of gurgling streams. He recalls as well the people from his past-a snake handler, his English grandfather, an NAACP preacher-and marvels at how time seems to have passed the Ozarks by, leaving touches of Old English in the language and leaving the lives of the people, in many ways, unchanged.
As helicopters purr above and rangers probe deep pools from motorboats, father and stepson pursue the ghost of the drownt boy down the stream. Along the way they visit caves and springs, talk with the locals about their lives, and witness the spectacular beauty of kingfishers and great blue herons, eels and trout flashing in the sun. But they must also confront the temperament of a river threatening to burst from its banks as they maneuver through an obstacle course of downed trees, rushing rapids, and upturned roots ready to impale a swimmer.
Winding through the surging waters of an Ozark river and through a flood of memories of an Ozark childhood, The Drownt Boy is a lyrical depiction of one man's journey home.
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The Courtyard of Dreams
Anna Monardo
This culturally rich first novel by Anna Monardo tells the story of seventeen-year-old Giulia Di Cuore, a first-generation Italian-American growing up in the 1960s. The young protagonist struggles with the old-world values of her father, who insists that she travel to Italy to visit her extended family. To her own surprise, Giula discovers there her place in the world as a daughter, as a woman and as an American."A novel of great beauty and perception."-Pat Conroy"An important novel which examines the metaphor of ocean crossings."-Professor Teresa Picarazzi, University of Arizona
Books and monographs by Writer's Workshop faculty members are collected here.
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