Fiction - Recent Titles from Ohio University Press

The Last of the Husbandmen

Fri, 01 Feb 2008

The Last of the Husbandmen (2008)
A Novel of Farming Life

By Gene Logsdon

“Nan turned to see Ben’s face turn as hard and white as a sauerkraut crock. When he did not respond, Nan figured that he was just going to back off as he usually did, the shy and retiring husbandman. She did not know her history. She did not know that shy and retiring husbandmen have been known to revolt against oppression with pitchforks drawn.”
— The Last of the Husbandmen

In The Last of the Husbandmen, Gene Logsdon looks to his own roots in Ohio farming life to depict the personal triumphs and tragedies, clashes and compromises, and abiding human character of American farming families and communities. From the Great Depression, when farmers tilled the fields with plow horses, to the corporate farms and government subsidy programs of the present, this novel presents the complex transformation of a livelihood and of a way of life.

Two friends, one rich by local standards, and the other of more modest means, grow to manhood in a lifelong contest of will and character. In response to many of the same circumstances—war, love, moonshining, the Klan, weather, the economy—their different approaches and solutions to dealing with their situations put them at odds with each other, but we are left with a deeper understanding of the world that they have inherited and have chosen.

Part morality play and part personal recollection, The Last of the Husbandmen is both a lighthearted look at the past and a profound statement about the present state of farming life. It is also a novel that captures the spirit of those who have chosen to work the land they love.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/The+Last+of+the+Husbandmen.
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New Stories from the Southwest

Tue, 01 Jan 2008

New Stories from the Southwest (2008)

Edited by D. Seth Horton

The beauty and barrenness of the southwestern landscape naturally lends itself to the art of storytellers. It is a land of heat and dryness, a land of spirits, a land that is misunderstood by those living along the coasts.

New Stories from the Southwest presents nineteen short stories that appeared in North American periodicals between January and December 2006. Though many of these stories vary by aesthetics, tone, voice, and almost any other craft category one might wish to use, they are nevertheless bound together by at least one factor, which is that the landscape of the region plays a key role in their narratives. They each evoke and explore what it means to exist in this unique corner of the country.

Selected by editor D. Seth Horton, the former fiction editor for the Sonora Review, from a wide cross-section of journals and magazines, and with a foreword by noted writer Ray Gonzalez, New Stories from the Southwest presents a generous sampling of the best of contemporary fiction situated in this often overlooked area of the country. Swallow Press is particularly pleased to publish this wide-ranging collection of stories from both new and established writers.

Contributors to New Stories from the Southwest are:
- Alan Cheuse
- Matt Clark
- Lorien Crow
- Kathleen De Azvedo
- Alan Elyshevitz
- Marcela Fuentes
- Dennis Fulgoni
- Ray Gonzalez
- Anna Green
- Donald Lucio Hurd
- Toni Jensen
- Charles Kemnitz
- Elmo Lum
- Tom McWhorter
- S. G. Miller
- Peter Rock
- Alicita Rodriguez
- John Tait
- Patrick Tobin
- Valery Varble

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/New+Stories+from+the+Southwest.
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Teach the Free Man

Thu, 15 Mar 2007

Teach the Free Man (2007)
Stories

By Peter Nathaniel Malae

The twelve stories in Teach the Free Man mark the impressive debut of Peter Nathaniel Malae. The subject of incarceration thematically links the stories, yet their range extends beyond the prison’s barbed wire and iron bars. Avoiding sensationalism, Malae exposes the heart and soul in those dark, seemingly inaccessible corridors of the human experience.

The stories, often raw and startlingly honest, are distinguished by the colloquial voices of California’s prison inmates, who, despite their physical and cultural isolation, confront dilemmas with which we can all identify: the choice to show courage against peer pressure; the search for individual rights within a bureaucracy; and the desperate desire for honor in the face of great sacrifice. These stories present polished and poetic examples of finding something redemptive in the least among us.

The book’s epigraph by W. H. Auden, from which the book takes its title, exemplifies the spirit of these dynamic stories:

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start.
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Teach+the+Free+Man.
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Holy Week

Fri, 01 Dec 2006

Holy Week (2006)
A Novel of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

By Jerzy Andrzejewski

At the height of the Nazi extermination campaign in the Warsaw Ghetto, a young Jewish woman, Irena, seeks the protection of her former lover, a young architect, Jan Malecki. By taking her in, he puts his own life and the safety of his family at risk. Over a four-day period, Tuesday through Friday of Holy Week 1943, as Irena becomes increasingly traumatized by her situation, Malecki questions his decision to shelter Irena in the apartment where Malecki, his pregnant wife, and his younger brother reside. Added to his dilemma is the broader context of Poles’ attitudes toward the “Jewish question” and the plight of the Jews locked in the ghetto during the final moments of its existence.

Few fictional works dealing with the war have been written so close in time to the events that inspired them. No other Polish novel treats the range of Polish attitudes toward the Jews with such unflinching honesty.

Jerzy Andrzejewski's Holy Week (Wielki Tydzien, 1945), one of the significant literary works to be published immediately following the Second World War, now appears in English for the first time.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Holy+Week.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Sarah’s Girls

Wed, 01 Nov 2006

Sarah’s Girls (2006)
A Chronicle of Big Ugly Creek

By Lenore McComas Coberly

Situated in a remote outpost in West Virginia at the turn of the last century, the story that Lenore McComas Coberly tells in Sarah's Girls is one of place, people, and unquenchable spirit. In this fictionalized account of her recent ancestors, Coberly masterfully traces the journeys of their lives, their dreams, and their hardships over the course of the twentieth century.

At its center is the story of Lena, who returns to care for her dead sister's daughters, giving up the promise of a life that can spare her the adversity rural living guarantees. The author goes back to Big Ugly Creek, the place where her grandparents met—and the place whose memory she cannot leave.

Using the stories she was told in her childhood as a bridge to the past, Coberly uncovers facts about her family history from documents that have made their way from one generation to another and the truth from the inherent understanding she has of these people who are so close to her.

But Sarah's Girls is not about the author; it is about the people and a place she loves. It is fiction written to tell the deeper truth about the hold West Virginia—its mountains and its valleys—has on its people.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Sarah%E2%80%99s+Girls.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

The Quick-Change Artist

Sat, 30 Sep 2006

The Quick-Change Artist (2006)
Stories

By Cary Holladay

In these stories of magic and memory, clustered around a resort hotel in a small Virginia community, Cary Holladay takes the reader on an excursion through the changes wrought by time on the community and its visitors. From the quiet of a rural forest to the rhythms of rock and roll, The Quick-Change Artist is at once whimsical and hard-edged, dizzying in its matter-of-fact delivery of the fantastic.

Romance, a sense of place and belonging, and the supernatural—especially in the lives of children coming of age—offer windows into worlds beyond the ordinary throughout The Quick-Change Artist. In the title story, a young chambermaid is in love with a foreign magician who performs at the hotel where she works. In “Heaven,” set during the 1918 flu epidemic, a struggling mother and son rely on the support of their fortune-telling plow horse. The narrator of “Jane's Hat” recalls a childhood enlivened by an unusual school principal and a friend who starts finding beauty everywhere.

Horses and the people who love them, wanderers and those who feed them, creatures that disappear and those who search for them: these are stories with a constant heart.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/The+Quick-Change+Artist.
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The Prisoner Pear

Tue, 15 Nov 2005

The Prisoner Pear (2005)
Stories from the Lake

By Elissa Minor Rust

The twelve stories in The Prisoner Pear: Stories from the Lake take place in an affluent suburb of Portland, Oregon, but they could be taken from any number of similar enclaves across the United States. These stories infuse stark reality with occasional hints of magical realism to explore what the American dream means to twenty-first-century suburbanites. In a city where the homecoming queen still makes the front page of the weekly newspaper, ducks caught in storm drains and stolen campaign signs make up the bulk of the paper's crime reports. The community's hidden complexities, however, rival those of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio.

Each of the stories begins with an entry from the newspaper's police blotter. Elissa Minor Rust fills in the background to these small, odd events-a headless parakeet found in a mailbox, a nude jogger, an alarmingly deathlike discarded teddy bear. Her stories, both humorous and disturbing, probe beneath the clear, hard surface of a community into the murky depths beneath.

The lake at the center of town is a constant in the lives of this town’s people, and it reappears throughout the book as a symbol of wealth and power, of love and loss. The Prisoner Pear offers a rare look inside the heart of suburban America. Reading these stories is, as one character observes, “like seeing the town from the inside out, as if the lake was its heart and the rest merely its bones and skin.”

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/The+Prisoner+Pear.
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Testaments

Mon, 30 May 2005

Testaments (2005)
Two Novellas of Emigration and Exile

By Danuta Mostwin

Polish émigrés have written poignantly about the pain of exile in letters, diaries, and essays; others, more recently, have recreated Polish-American communities in works of fiction. But it is Danuta Mostwin's fiction, until now unavailable in English translation, that bridges the divide between Poland and America, exile and emigration.

Mostwin and her husband survived the ravages of World War II, traveled to Britain, and then emigrated to the United States. Mostwin devoted her scholarly career to the study of immigrants trapped between cultural worlds. Winner of international awards for her fiction, Danuta Mostwin here offers two novellas, translated by the late Marta Erdman, which are the first of her works published in English in the United States.

Deeply melancholic and moving in its unsentimental depiction of ordinary people trying to make sense of their uprooted lives, Testaments presents two powerful vignettes of life in immigrant America, The Last Will of Blaise Twardowski and Jocasta. This timely publication provides an introduction to Mostwin's work that will ensure that she is recognized as the creator of one of the most nuanced and deeply moving pictures of emigration and exile in Polish-American literature.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Testaments.
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A Poet’s Prose

Tue, 03 May 2005

A Poet’s Prose (2005)
Selected Writings of Louise Bogan

By Mary Kinzie

Although best known as a master of the formal lyric poem, Louise Bogan (1897- 1970) also published fiction and what would now be called lyrical essays. A Poet’s Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan showcases her devotion to compression, eloquence, and sharp truths.

Louise Bogan was poetry reviewer for the New Yorker for thirty-eight years, and her criticism was remarkable for its range and effect. Bogan was responsible for the revival of interest in Henry James and was one of the first American critics to notice and review W. H. Auden. She remained intellectually and emotionally responsive to writers as different from one another as Caitlin Thomas, Dorothy Richardson, W. B. Yeats, André Gide, and Rainer Maria Rilke.

Bogan’s short stories appeared regularly in magazines during the 1930s, penetrating the social habits of the city as well as the loneliness there. The autobiographical element in her fiction and journals, never entirely confessional, spurred some of her finest writing. The distinguished poet and critic Mary Kinzie provides in A Poet’s Prose a selection of Bogan's best criticism, prose meditations, letters, journal entries, autobiographical essays, and published and unpublished fiction.

Louise Bogan won the Bollingen Prize in 1954 for her collected poems. She is the subject of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography by Elizabeth Frank, Louise Bogan: A Portrait.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/A+Poet%E2%80%99s+Prose.
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The Confessions of Señora Francesca Navarro and Other Stories

Sat, 01 Jan 2005

The Confessions of Señora Francesca Navarro and Other Stories (2005)

By Natalie L. M. Petesch

“Memory, of course, is sometimes like a bucking horse, sometimes a runaway one, and one must control the reins until finally it stops, snorting with exhausted relief,” writes Natalie L. M. Petesch in her haunting new collection, The Confessions of Señora Francesca Navarro and Other Stories.

Petesch immerses readers in the lives of people caught up in the 1936–39 Spanish Civil War, which left more than five hundred thousand dead. She captures the hand-to-mouth existence on the streets of Madrid of two war orphans; an old soldier’s memories of a fallen militiawoman; the dilemma of Franco’s laundress as she seeks to duplicate a stolen religious icon she finds in his home; and a man’s struggle to find his bride among thousands of Republican refugees waiting for ships to evacuate them before Franco’s Fascists arrive to kill them.

In the title novella, an elderly woman describes to her granddaughter how the families of Franco’s officers fighting against Republican militiamen endured hunger, filth, and danger in an underground fortress. Petesch conveys the humiliating details of war through the sensibility of a cultured woman who recalls only too vividly latrines made of laundry tubs, the smell of unwashed humans, and the stench of death.

Brilliant in its imaginative power and heartbreaking in its access to the bottomless well of human tears, The Confessions of Señora Francesca Navarro and Other Stories is the work of a mature artist able to convey a particular world so vividly that we know these people as our own.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/The+Confessions+of+Se%C3%B1ora+Francesca+Navarro+and+Other+Stories.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.