Emily Jeanne Miller (MFA, 2002) Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt, 2012 ISBN: 9780544002241 Stay-at-home dad Logan Pyle is holding his life together by a thread: his larger-than-life father, Gus, has just died, his wife is distant, and his kindergarten-age son has regressed to drinking from a baby bottle and sucking his thumb. Complicating matters further is Bennie, […]
Sam Michel (MFA, 1994) Tyrant Books, 2012 There was a hot, high sun, a hard ground and a long way off to any certain water, and my wife, a tenderfoot, I thought, not immodest, seemed bent on ruined feet and spectacle, on making of herself to passing innocents a living proof of what could happen […]
Christopher Merkner (MFA, 2001) In Christopher Merkner’s midwestern fabulism, an enraged village gaslights unsuspecting vacationers and a young man delays an impending confession, fondling the nostrils of his mother’s pet pig. For these inheritors of tradition, that which binds them most closely — offering stability and identity and comfort — is precisely what sets them […]
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Mike Magnuson (MFA, 1997) Harper Collins, 2002 ISBN: 9780060193720 Part farce, part treatise on what it means to be a man in America today, Lummox: The Evolution of a Man is the outrageous true-life tale of a twentysomething man stumbling through the Reagan years, trying to figure out what it means to be a “man’s man” during […]
Mike Magnuson (MFA, 1997) Fiction Collective Two, 2012 ISBN: 9781573661690 A hilarious and essential illustrated field guide that breaks down the tribes of the bicycling community: from the spandex-clad weekend warriors to the hipsters on street bikes who love to laugh at each other (and themselves). Anyone who rides a bike knows the bicycling world […]
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Mike Magnuson (MFA, 1997) HarperCollins, 1997 ISBN: 0060187107 Gunnar and Dewy are “repo” men – one white, one black – who work for a furniture and appliance rental company in a tough, inner-city neighborhood. Dewy, a foul-mouthed realist, happily takes Gunnar under his wing and tries to teach him how to maneuver safely through the […]
Mike Magnuson (MFA, 1997) Harmony, 2004 ISBN: 9781400052400 Take one very large guy. Add booze, cigarettes, and an extreme amount of junk food. Mix in a wry, self-effacing wit. Throw in a bike. The result? Heft on Wheels, a potently funny look at turning your life around, one insanely unrealistic goal at a time. Not that […]
Mike Magnuson (MFA, 1997) HarperCollins, 1998 ISBN: 0060175958 The Fire Gospels takes place in the McCutcheon River Valley inWisconsin during a long-standing drought. Through characters like Grady McCann, a hardworking maintenance man at an old folks’ home; his wife, Erica, a strangely evangelic Catholic; and Lucky Littlefield, the local weatherman turned preacher who enjoins his viewers […]
Margarent Luongo (MFA, 2001) Louisiana State University Press, 2008 ISBN: 9780807133767 The sixteen stories in Margaret Luongo’s If the Heart Is Lean etch sharp portraits of people in odd and sometimes surreal situations who thus have the opportunity to view their lives from a unique perspective. In “Chestnut Season,” a young woman stalled in traffic sees her […]