Review:
""Nebraska" depicts a rowdy, changing American West 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 obsession past and present." "Washington Post Book World""
"Unforgettable stories, each utterly different from the one before. ... This is writing that slows the breathing." -- San Francisco Chronicle
"Extraordinary ... the work of an accomplished craftsman and a superb storyteller. The title story is an absolutely stunning portrayal of a physical place on the Earth. Nebraska -- the state, the place -- takes on the attributes of a living force, a character in itself, and the effect is a powerful, almost supernatural personification of geography and human culture. You watch the small prairie towns as they live and die. . . Ron Hansen's stories are powered by inexorable currents of fate ... [His] talent for sensuous detail travels very well -- to the late 1800's, to the 1940's, to the present day ... With him ... we hear the sound of time passing, the rumble of destiny." -- New York Times Book Review
"The land breathing, the sound of the wind, the rush of trains across the empty flatness of a Nebraska midnight. In all, it's the book I expected from Ron Hansen -- rich in its art, high in its thematic reach, resonating with the complexities of a dense and fully realized fictional world." -- Tim O'Brien
"Beautifully crafted stories. ... Wickedness, evil, malice is called by name; and for Hansen's people the snake in the garden never fails to appear." -- New York Times
"Just as Raymond Carver was 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 1980's breadwinners, of sudden storms and life-long yearnings, of lost souls stranded in the middle of nowhere. It should put him on the short-story map." -- USA Today
"Nebraska depicts a rowdy, changing American West 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 obsession past and present." -- Washington Post Book World
About the Author:
Ron Hansen is the author of eight novels and three short story collections. He graduated from Creighton University in Omaha, and went on to the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop where he studied with John Irving. He is now Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J., Professor in Arts and Humanities at Santa Clara University in northern California.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.