Professor Harriman's Steam Air-Ship charts a contemporary landscape of violence and death while reaching for joy and aiming for flight. This courageous, powerful collection stands among Svoboda's finest work.

Emigrating from Bohemia to Black Hawk, Nebraska, with her family, Antonia discovers no white-framed farmhouse or snug barn. Instead, the cultured Shimerda family finds itself huddled in a primitive sod house buffeted by the ceaselessly blowing winds on the Midwest prairie. For her childhood friend Jim Burden, Antonia comes to embody the elemental spirit of this frontier. Working alongside men, she survives without compromising the rich, deep power of her nature. And Willa Cather's lush descriptions of the rolling Nebraska grasslands interweave with the blossoming of a woman in the early days of the twentieth century in a novel that is an epic chronicle of America's past. My Antonia is one of those rare, highly prized works of great literature that not only enriches its readers but immerses them in a tale superbly told. The novel Cather herself considered her best, "My Antonia" is one of those rare, highly prized works of great literature that not only enriches its readers but immerses them in a tale superbly told.
With an Introduction by Marilyn Sides
and a New Afterword by Terese Svoboda

In this stunningly original collection of seventeen short stories, Terese Svoboda navigates a terrain of alienation and loss with searing, poetic prose. "I talk like a lady who knows what she wants," begins the vagrant narrator of the title story. She insists there's a wild child hiding among the cows in the gully near her home. Others in the trailer park think it's just herself she's chasing, but no one helps her sort out the truth-until there's a murder. Stark and disturbing, "Trailer Girl" is a story of cycles of child abuse and the dream to escape them. In "Psychic" a clairvoyant knows she's been hired by a murderer, in "Leadership" a tiny spaceship lands between a boy and his parents, in "Lost the Baby" a partying couple forget where they dropped off their baby, and in "White" a grandfather explains to his grandson how a family is like a collection of chicken parts. Frequently violent, always passionate, these often short short stories are not the condensed versions of longer works but are full-strength, as strong and precise as poetry. Watch the Trailer Girl book trailer on YouTube.

In piercing, unprettified prose, Terese Svoboda navigates the terrain of alienation and loss. "I talk like a lady who knows what she wants" is how the vagrant begins her story in "Trailer Girl." As she struggles to rescue what she says is a wild girl hiding in the gully, the neighbors become more certain than ever that the child is imaginary-until there's a murder. Stark and disturbing, "Trailer Girl" is the story of cycles of child abuse and the dream to escape them. In "Psychic," a clairvoyant knows she's been hired by a murderer, in "Leadership" a tiny spaceship lands between a boy and his parents, in "Venice," a woman performs the Heimlich maneuver on an ex-husband, then flees by gondola, and in "White," a grandfather explains to his grandson how a family is like a collection of chicken parts. Frequently violent, always passionate, these often short short stories are full-strength, as strong and precise as poetry.

Clare, an L.A. ad executive, is marooned in the Marshall Islands, site of U.S. nuclear testing. Little by little, she discovers from the natives the dark side of this island paradise.. Clare, an L.A. ad executive, wraps up a South Seas photo shoot for a soft drink dubbed Paradise. Believing she has found paradise, she remains in the South Seas for some rest and relaxation. By virtue of a bureaucratic mix-up, she finds herself marooned in the Marshall Islands, site of United States nuclear testing from 1948 to 1958.Stranded and spooked, Clare looks to Harry, her fellow castaway, for solace, but Harry, who has by now accumulated a harem, has no patience for Clares growing fears. Barclay, an enigmatic islander, wont reveal anything either. It is the island women--Breasts for Three, Clam Hold, and Mouse Touch--who draw Clare, whom they call Vagina Mouth, into their circle and reveal the islands terrifying secrets. Clare finally departs, only to learn that she cannot escape the dreadful realities of the island or those of her own past. Sex and death haunt this new novel from Terese Svoboda (author of Cannibal). Clare, an L.A. ad executive, wraps up a South Seas commercial for a soft drink called Paradise and decides to remain in the Pacific for a well-earned vacation. By virtue of a bureaucratic mix-up, she finds herself stranded on one of the more remote South Pacific islands and slowly discovers that life there is not what shes hoped.Barclay, an enigmatic islander, cannot tell Clare when the next boat is coming, nor will he unravel the disturbing mysteries that pervade this so-called paradise. Why is her hostess, Ngarima, indifferent to the intruder who attempts to rape Clare? Why does Ngarimas son brave the sea in a homemade boat in a desperate attempt to escape the island? Why do the native women swarm Harry, her fellow castaway? And what has happened to the eerily misshapen boy who inhabits the lagoon?Clare seeks solace in her colleague Harry, but he plans to remain on the island and has little patience for her growing fears. Stranded and spooked, Clare digs herself into the sand and stares out over the sea, desperately scanning the horizon for a ship.It is the island women--Breasts for Three, Clam Hold, and Mouse Touch--who reveal a life force gone awry and the terrifying secrets that force Clare to confront what she herself has shut away forever.In this lyrical and understated novel, Svoboda evokes the wet, lush decay of an island inhabited by living ghosts, shaping their story through the eyes of an outsider struggling to hide from all she sees.

Young Harriet's father sells her as a slave to settle his gambling debt with an eccentric Indian-and her story is just beginning. Part Huck Finn, part True Grit, Harriet's story of her encounter with the dark and brutal history of the American West is a true original. When she escapes the strange mound-building obsession of her Pawnee captor, Harriet sets off on a trek to find her father, only to meet with ever-stranger characters and situations along the way. She befriends a Jewish prairie peddler, escapes with a chanteuse, is imprisoned in a stockade and rescued by a Civil War balloonist, and becomes an accidental shopkeeper and the surrogate mother to an abandoned child, while abetting the escape of runaway slaves. A picaresque in the American vein, Terese Svoboda's new novel is the Bohemian answer to Willa Cather's iconic My Antonia. Lifting the shadows off an entire era of American history in one brave girl's quest to discover who she is, Bohemian Girl gives full play to Svoboda's prodigious talents for finding the dark and the strange in the sunny American story-and the beauty and the hope in its darkest moments.

Out of a Shakespearean-wild Midwest dust storm, a man rises. "Just a glimpse of him," says his sister; "every inch of him," says his guilt-filled lover. "Close your eyes," says his nephew. "What about it?" asks his father. The cupboard is filled with lime Jell-O, and there are aliens, deadly kissing, and a restless, alcoholic mother who carries a gun. "Every family is this normal," insists the narrator. "Whoever noticed my brother, with a family as normal as this?" the beleaguered sister asks. Against the smoky prairie horizon and despite his seizures, a brother builds a life. Imbued with melancholy cheer, Dog on Fire unfolds around a family's turmoil, past loves, and a mysterious death.

"This is God," the novel begins, and we are spinning on our way into the heart of a Midwest that spans spirits and centuries and forever redefines the middle of nowhere. Whispers plague a desperate conquistador lost in tall prairie grass. Four hundred years later, a male go-go dancer flings a bag of dope into the same field. God, in the person of a perm-giving, sheetcake-baking Nebraska farm woman, casts a jaundiced yet merciful eye over the unfolding chaos. Fire and a pair of judiciously applied pantyhose bring the two stories together. A contemplation of divinity and drugs on the ground, Tin God is a funny yet poignant, time-shifting story of the plains that transcends its interstate spine and exposes us to a whole new level of Terese Svoboda's fiery prose.

All of the medical, technological, and psychological advances of the twentieth century challenge "mere mortals" in Terese Svoboda's third book of poetry. In "Faust," a mini-epic in five acts, the eponymous character of literary legend appears in the form of a woman, who redefines what being mortal means in light of the politics of the Third World, and gender. In contrast "Ptolemy's Rules for High School Reunions" explores what happens when you do without a pact with the devil. The gods--Greek and otherwise--also make appearances as a TV announcer in "Philomela," in the basement with the plumber in "The Smell of Burning Pennies," and in the dyslexic confusion between "Dog/God." But it is not only the divine that charges the poems in "Mere Mortals"--sex also suffuses and reinvents key relationships. Readers of such wittily probing poems as "The Root of Father is Fat" and "Brassiere: Prison or Showcase?" will know why Philip Levine has described Svoboda as "one light-year from being the polite, loverly, workshop poet.
"Mere Mortals' poems first appeared in such magazines as the "New Yorker," "New York Times Magazine," "Paris Review," and the "American Poetry Review."

These are poems of family, of romantic hope and disappointment, of parenthood, and of grief that move from a childhood in Nebraska in which a father strides into a ripe wheat field; to the parks and parking lots of New York City, the interchangeable landscapes of suburban America, and the more sensual environment of secluded water; to little traveled parts of Africa and the Pacific where our customs and passions are refracted into shapes that are sometimes beautiful, sometimes grotesque.
Terese Svoboda writes of a world in which the reassuring simplicity remembered from childhood is difficult to recover. Outside of this vision of the past, all present life seems an aberration--an existence where violence can supplant love, families break apart, a child dies.
"All Aberration" received a starred review in "Publishers Weekly," a lead in "Contemporary Poetry 1986" and a Notable Book nomination by the American Library Association. It was written during stays at Yaddo, MacDowell and Ossabaw, and received the benefit of a Creative Artists Public Service grant in 1982. Its poems first appeared in such magazines as "Harper's," "The Nation," "Paris Review," and "Ploughshares."

First published in the dark days immediately before World War II, Capital City is Mari Sandoz's angriest and most political novel. Like many important American novels of the 1930s-John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, Jack Conroy's The Disinherited, Robert Cantwell's Land of Plenty-Capital City depicts the troubles of working people trapped in the Great Depression. A unique portrayal of how the Depression affected the Great Plains, it examines the forces that bitterly contended for wealth and power. Sandoz researched the daily life and behind-the-scenes operations of several state capitals in the thirties before synthesizing them in this novel, which is part allegory, part indictment, part warning. Famous for her passionate writing, Sandoz imbued Capital City with the full measure of her outrage Mari Sandoz (1896-1966) is one of Nebraska's foremost authors. She wrote twenty-three books about the High Plains region, including Crazy Horse, Cheyenne Autumn, and Old Jules, available in Bison Books editions. Terese Svoboda is the author of four novels, most recently Tin God (Nebraska 2006), and grew up on the edge of the Sandhills