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Nebraska: Stories Kindle Edition
“Nebraska captures a rowdy, changing America. Written with wit and brawny lyricism, in voices ranging from hip to tender, the stories gathered here are as diverse and expansive as the country they celebrate…References to America’s heartland abound throughout the book and serve as a central metaphor for what’s close to American hearts, what connects us: dreams, myths and possibilities as vast as the Great Plains. Wise and smart-alecky, creaking with legend and crackling with modernisms, these tales are about American obsessions past and present.” –The Washington Post Book World
“Just as Raymond Carver came to be identified with a Pacific Northwest populated by blue-collar workers, and just as Richard Ford has crafted a Montana full of drifters, so Ron Hansen has carved out his own geographical niche. His Nebraska is a distinctive mix of 19th century settlers and 1980s breadwinners, of sudden storms and life-long yearnings, of lost souls stranded in the middle of nowhere.” –USA Today
“Beautifully crafted stories… Wickedness, evil, malice is called by name; and for Hansen’s people the snake in the garden never fails to appear.” —The New York Times
“Breathtaking virtuosity…These short narratives are utterly clean and smooth; they click together like a collection of river-washed stones that are each remarkably different yet polished by the same hand.”—Publishers Weekly
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherAtlantic Monthly Press
- Publication dateMarch 1, 2012
- File size2717 KB
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Product details
- ASIN : B00BAH9SLO
- Publisher : Atlantic Monthly Press (March 1, 2012)
- Publication date : March 1, 2012
- Language : English
- File size : 2717 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 188 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,354,763 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #6,842 in Historical Literary Fiction
- #11,075 in Contemporary Literary Fiction
- #19,593 in Single Authors Short Stories
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Ron Hansen is from Nebraska, and six of the eleven pieces in this collection are set in Nebraska. The last piece bears the same plain title - "Nebraska" - and it is a short profile of a Nebraska town near the Niobrara River. The first story in the collection is a collage of misfortunes visited on the inhabitants of Nebraska by the blizzard of 1888. Those two bookend pieces and three other stories ("Playland", "Can I Just Sit Here for a While?", and "Red-Letter Days") are above average and worth reading. As for the other six stories, I frankly would rather have spent the time reading them on something else (one of them was execrable).
So, as much as I admire Ron Hansen's overall work, NEBRASKA merits only three stars in my book.
"Wickedness": winters in Nebraska can be brutal, but January of 1888 will go down in history. The weather was pure wickedness. The story is a collage of small stories. It opens on a train, where a young teacher, on her way to Nebraska, shares the ride with a poor carpenter who lost his limbs and ears to frostbite. It continues with a variety of sad and happy endings. My favorite was the one about the pony in charge of delivering a message to parents who did not know where their child was.
"True Romance": another great story, very allegorical, about a mysterious evil force that kills cows in a particularly gruesome way. Don't want to spoil the ending, but I certainly did not see it coming.
"Red-Letter Days": an old man, avid golfer, recovering alcoholic, retired lawyer, keeps a diary. If you thought that diaries were only for teenage girls, think again. So sweet, so moving the feelings that he can pour on those pages.
I had to work hard to finish this book