A Book of Fields: Tales from the Pioneer Valley - Softcover

Billias, Stephen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1733575006 ISBN 13: 9781733575003

Publisher: Odeon Press, 2019

Synopsis

A Book of Fields is a collection of fictional stories about the people of the Pioneer Valley in western Massachusetts. Each story takes its name from a town that ends in “field”--Ashfield, Deerfield, Greenfield and so forth. Each story has characters and locales from the towns that will be recognizable to anyone who has spent any time in the area. A few of the stories share characters. Almost every story deals with a crime, or something like a crime, but this is not a crime novel. Taken together, the stories in A Book of Fields are a portrait of a world that is rapidly disappearing--the lush farms and fields of the Connecticut River basin shrinking every year, and the agricultural way of life giving way to suburbia. The people change as the land use changes. A Book of Fields is about this time, this place, and the hardy, independent, passionate and sometimes hardheaded people who live there.

About this title

Review:

A Book of Fields is a marvelous, wry, exuberant collection of stories, filled with the human and the magical. I love how each story is its own "field," ready to surprise and move you, as you walk into it. A witty and inspiring fictional portrait of this region of New England. 

Harriet Scott Chessman, author of Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper and The Beauty of Ordinary Things.

 

Billias’ A Book of Fields is a charming and compelling collection of the absurd, the gentle, the ridiculous, the generous, the miserly. Humanity writ small as seen through the lens of a region he clearly loves and has defined so vividly by its characters. Even as a recent New England transplant, I recognized them all.

John Harrison, Writer/Director in film & TV: Dune, the Miniseries, Tales from the Darkside. Author of the novel Destiny Gardens.

About the Author:

Stephen Billias is the author of seven published science fiction/fantasy novels, including The American Book of the Dead and Quest for the Thirty-Six, both published by Warner Books. Mr. Billias has also written several screenplays. In 2005 he sold a film treatment with director/writer John Harrison to The Walt Disney Company for Disney's Animated Features Division. In 2009, Mr. Billias co-produced the documentary Seeking the 36 with director/writer Dennis Lanson. Mr. Billias lives in Deerfield, Massachusetts. He is married and has a daughter Sophia, a law school student at Case Western Reserve. His hobbies include backpacking trips to the Grand Canyon and the Sierra Nevada range, and the practice of Shintaido, a Japanese body movement and martial art. From 2006 to 2016, Mr. Billias and his wife Bela Breslau operated the Shintaido Farm, a center for the practice of Shintaido.

About this edition

• Publisher: Odeon Press
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1733575006
• ISBN 13: 9781733575003
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224