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The stories collected in This Is Not the Tropics come from the
geographic center of a divided nation, and its protagonists evoke a
split personality-one half submerged in America's own diehard
mythology, the other half searching to escape tradition. Together
they form a portrait of the Plains that is both quirky and
poignant. While the themes in this collection are familiar-love and
betrayal, loneliness and regret, the needs of the individual versus
the needs of the community-the tales themselves are startling and
new. Whether it is the story of an eccentric out-of-work accordion
player; a woman ending a long marriage against the backdrop of a
visit from her failing mother; a young girl who wishes to solve a
mystery until real mystery enters her life; or all of the men in a
small Nebraska town who annually compete in a hilariously earnest
beauty pageant, these are tales that speak of the lives lived in
the small towns, the prairie cities, and on the dirt roads off blue
highways in the middle of nowhere and everywhere.
In 2015, when cyberbullies disrupt her life in Southern California,
Vivi Marx decides to cut her cord with the internet and take her
life offline for a year. She flees to the one place where she felt
safe as a child—with her grandmother in Lincoln, Nebraska.
Nevermind that her grandmother is long dead and she doesn’t know
anyone else in the state. Even before she meets her new neighbors
on Fieldcrest Drive, Vivi knows she’s made a terrible mistake,
but every plan she makes to leave is foiled. Despite her efforts to
outrun it, trouble follows her to Nebraska, just not in the ways
she’d feared. With the help of her neighbors, Willa Cather’s
novels, and her own imagination, Vivi finds something she hadn’t
known she was searching for.
Early July, and the corn in eastern Nebraska stands ten feet tall;
after a near-decade of drought, it seems too good to be true, and
everyone is watching the sky for trouble. For the Grebels, whose
plots of organic crops trace a modest patchwork among the vast
fields of soybeans and corn, trouble arrives from a different
quarter in the form of Elsa's voice on her estranged son's
answering machine: "Your father's dead. You'll probably want to
come home." When a tractor accident fells the patriarch of this
Mennonite family, the threads holding them together are suddenly
drawn taut, singing with the tensions of a lifetime's worth of love
and faith, betrayal and shame. Through the competing voices of
those gathered for Haven Grebel's funeral, acts of loyalty and
failures, long-suppressed resentments and a tragic secret are
brought to light, expressing a larger, complex truth.
The stories collected in This Is Not the Tropics come from the
geographic centre of a divided nation, and its protagonists evoke a
split personality--one half submerged in America's own diehard
mythology, the other half searching to escape tradition. Together
they form a portrait of the Plains that is both quirky and
poignant. While the themes in this collection are familiar--love
and betrayal, loneliness and regret, the needs of the individual
versus the needs of the community--the tales themselves are
startling and new. Whether it is the story of an eccentric
out-of-work accordion player; a woman ending a long marriage
against the backdrop of a visit from her failing mother; a young
girl who wishes to solve a mystery until real mystery enters her
life; or all of the men in a small Nebraska town who annually
compete in a hilariously earnest beauty pageant, these are tales
that speak of the lives lived in the small towns, the prairie
cities, and on the dirt roads off blue highways in the middle of
nowhere and everywhere.
After her life as she knows it ends in heartbreak, Mary Rasmussen,
a strong-willed and independent young ranch woman living in the
Sandhills of western Nebraska, suddenly feels that everything she
has believed in-God, her instincts, the land itself-has failed her.
She abandons her cultural and emotional ties, succumbing to
circumstances she thinks she is powerless to control. In a rash
decision, she marries a conservative, patriarchal preacher who
doesn't understand her, the ranching community, or anything beyond
his own beliefs. Mary's inner turmoil builds as she comes to
appreciate the gravity of her situation and the need to take
action.
A vast, barren landscape or a place of subtle natural beauty; the
middle of nowhere or the gateway to the cultural and historical
riches of the West; many things to many people and a cipher to many
more--the great state of Nebraska is by force of circumstances a
place of possibilities. What these possibilities are and what they
promise are precisely what the writers of "The Big Empty "tell us.
Exploring the state from its rural reaches to its urban engines,
from its marvelous ecosystems to its myriad historical and cultural
offerings, these narratives evoke Nebraska in all its facets.
Writers as diverse as Ron Hansen, Ted Kooser, Michael Anania, Bob
Kerrey, Mary Pipher, Delphine Red Shirt, and William Kloefkorn,
among many others, bring a wealth of perspectives and styles to
topics such as the Oregon Trail and the Cheyenne Exodus, farming
and Internet cafes, politics, weather, and family secrets. The
result is a portrait whose broad strokes and rich detail capture
the mysterious character of Nebraska.
O Pioneers was oh so long ago, and yet Willa Cather's masterpiece
has proven to be an enduring template for readers' notions of
Nebraska writing. The short stories collected here, so richly
various in style, theme, and subject matter, should put an end to
any such plain thinking about writing from this anything-but-plain
state. Nebraska writers all, the authors explore the Midwest, a
vastness of small towns, corn, cattle, football, and family
businesses. They also venture far afield, to desolate western
lives, crowded urban relationships, poignant couplings, comic
families, and the worldly idiosyncrasies of characters everywhere.
Whether about aging or coming-of-age, leave-taking or coming home,
falling apart or finding love, these stories represent contemporary
fiction at its best, from the high style of Richard Dooling's
"Immortal Man" to Kent Haruf's soft-spoken "Dancing," from Ron
Hansen's "My Communist" to Jonis Agee's earthy, offbeat "Binding
the Devil." Original, spirited, and surprising, these contemporary
writings depict a modern world on the move and extend the tradition
of great fiction from Nebraska into the twenty-first century.
Ladette Randolph, the associate director and humanities editor at
the University of Nebraska Press. She is the author of a collection
of short stories This Is Not the Tropics (2006) and recipient of
numerous awards, including the Virginia Faulkner Award, Rona Jaffe
Foundation Writer's Award, and a Pushcart Prize. Mary Pipher has
taught clinical psychology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln
and is the author of several books, including the bestseller
Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls.
The stories collected in ""This Is Not the Tropics"" come from the
geographic center of a divided nation, and its protagonists evoke a
split personality - one half submerged in America's own die hard
mythology, the other half searching to escape tradition. Together
they form a portrait of the Plains that is both quirky and
poignant. While the themes in this collection are familiar - love
and betrayal, loneliness and regret, the needs of the individual
versus the needs of the community - the stories themselves are
startling and new. Whether it is the story of an eccentric,
out-of-work accordion player; a woman ending a long marriage
against the backdrop of a visit from her failing mother; a young
girl who wishes to solve a mystery until real mystery enters her
life; two sisters who watch as their mother battles an entire town,
including their father; a man who comes to be suspicious of his new
girlfriend's stalker story; or all of the men in a small Nebraska
town who annually compete in a hilariously earnest beauty pageant,
these are tales that speak of the lives lived in the small towns,
the prairie cities, and on the dirt roads off blue highways in the
middle of nowhere and everywhere.
Ladette Randolph understands her life best through the houses she
has inhabited. From the isolated farmhouse of her childhood, to the
series of houses her family occupied in small towns across Nebraska
as her father pursued his dream of becoming a minister, to the
equally small houses she lived in as a single mother and graduate
student, houses have shaped her understanding of her place in the
world and served as touchstones for a life marked by both constancy
and endless cycles of change.
On September 12, 2001, Randolph and her husband bought a
dilapidated farmhouse on twenty acres outside Lincoln, Nebraska,
and set about gutting and rebuilding the house themselves. They had
nine months to complete the work. The project, undertaken at a time
of national unrest and uncertainty, led Randolph to reflect on the
houses of her past and the stages of her life that played out in
each, both painful and joyful. As the couple struggles to bring the
dilapidated house back to life, Randolph simultaneously traces the
contours of a life deeply shaped by the Nebraska plains, where her
family has lived for generations, and how those roots helped her
find the strength to overcome devastating losses as a young adult.
Weaving together strands of departures and arrivals, new houses and
deep roots, cycles of change and the cycles of the seasons,
"Leaving the Pink House" is a richly layered and compelling memoir
of the meaning of home and family, and how they can never really
leave us, even if we leave them.
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