Fiction—Short Stories

The American Wife by Elaine Ford

Greetings from Cutler County by Travis Mulhauser

A Near-Perfect Gift by Rose Marie Kinder

The American Wife

Elaine Ford

Rights: World
For more info, contact Mary Bisbee-Beek at bisbeeb@umich.edu

A brilliant collection of keenly observed stories from the 2006 winner of the Michigan Literary Fiction Award for short fiction

Of Elaine Ford's earlier novel, Missed Connections, The Washington Post wrote that it is a work "of small episodes, of precise sentences, of unusual clarity". Much of the same could be said of The American Wife, this year's winner of the Michigan Literary Fiction Award for short fiction. Throughout the collection, Ford shows herself to be a writer who never takes the easy out, and that is what gives these pieces their strength and resonance.

In one story, a penniless World War II vet moves into the garage next door and begins to paint snow scenes on wood boards. Years later his work appears in a Boston art show. In another, a young wife and her baby, alone in the Greek countryside while her archaeologist husband goes on extended digs, finds that her child has been abducted and exchanged with another—or has it?

Throughout her stories, Ford touches on the mysteries, triumphs, insults, unanswered loves and dreams deferred—the literal and figurative small deaths that make up our lives. Each story in itself is a masterpiece in miniature of such detail as to open a door into seeing the world in new ways.

Elaine Ford is the author of five novels. For her fiction she has received two National Endowment for the Arts grants and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is Professor Emerita at the University of Maine, where she taught creative writing and literature. Presently she lives in Harpswell, Maine.

October 2007
192 pages

Greetings from Cutler County: A Novella and Stories

Travis Mulhauser

Rights: World
For more info, contact Mary Bisbee-Beek at bisbeeb@umich.edu

Greetings from Cutler County is both a nonstop ride of tragic hilarity, and a piercing look at the complexities of youth. In one northern Michigan community the lives of desperate small-town dreamers are examined through an ensemble cast as earnest as they are outrageous, and as compelling as they are heartbreaking. The lovers, crooks, failures, and survivors of Cutler County are so flawed and genuine you can't help rooting for them—no matter how foolish or hopeless their pursuits may seem.

Set on the banks of Lake Michigan, these stories are inseparable from the stark shoreline, cavernous woods, and vast inland lakes that shape life in northern Michigan—and create a landscape as rugged and dramatic as youth itself. Greetings from Cutler County explores the common triumphs and tragedies of coming of age, while providing a rationale and humor that is uniquely and unforgettably its own.

Travis Mulhauser is a native of Michigan and currently a lecturer at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro. This is his first book.

May 2005
192 pages

A Near-Perfect Gift

Rose Marie Kinder

Rights: World
For more info, contact Mary Bisbee-Beek at bisbeeb@umich.edu

In the tradition of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, the stories in A Near-Perfect Gift center around small-town life in one rural community. Like any other place, it's a community where both the banal and the improbable come together, a place with its share of common tragedies and uncommon madmen, some of whom howl at the moon, and others who turn out to be heroes. It's the sort of place where small questions assume enormous proportions: was that a snake beneath the woodpile? Could a pregnant bat climb out of a hole in the ground? The answers never cease to be surprising.

Rose Marie Kinder is the author of Sweet Angel Band (Willa Cather Award, Helicon Nine Editions 1991). Her fiction has appeared in Passages North, Southern Indiana Review, Other Voices, Notre Dame Review, and elsewhere. Her non-fiction and poetry have appeared in Confrontation, and The Atlanta Review. From 1991-2002, Kinder edited the literary journal Pleiades at Central Missouri State University. Currently she runs Sweetgum and Cave Hollow Presses out of Warrensburg, Missouri.

Fall 2005
192 pages