Search results for ""Author Laird Hunt""

Finalist for 2013 PEN/Faulkner Award "There is always a surprise in the voice and in the heart of Laird Hunt's stories, with its echoes of habit caught in a timeless dialect, so we see the world he gives us as if new. 'You hear something like that and it walks out the door with you.'"--Michael Ondaatje "Laird Hunt's Kind One, about two slave girls who take their white mistress into captivity, is a profound meditation on the sexual and racial subconscious of America...[A] gorgeous and terrifying novel."--Danzy Senna As a teenage girl, Ginny marries Linus Lancaster, her mother's second cousin, and moves to his Kentucky pig farm "ninety miles from nowhere." In the shadows of the lush Kentucky landscape, Ginny discovers the empty promises of Linus' "paradise"--a place where the charms of her husband fall away to reveal a troubled man and cruel slave owner. Ginny befriends the young slaves Cleome and Zinnia who work at the farm--until Linus' attentions turn to them, and she finds herself torn between her husband and only companions. The events that follow Linus' death change all three women for life. Haunting, chilling, and suspenseful, Kind One is a powerful tale of redemption and human endurance in antebellum America. Laird Hunt is the author of several works of fiction and a finalist for the 2010 PEN Center USA Award in Fiction. Currently on the faculty of the University of Denver's creative writing program, he and his wife, the poet Eleni Sikelianos, live in Boulder, Colorado, with their daughter, Eva Grace.

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If Tarantino and Lynch fans, Lost and Twilight Zone viewers read deeply, then Laird Hunt would be their hero. His writing is full of sincerity, yet stylishly opaque, and his cultural and historical references are both pop and obscure. Like Auster and Lethem before him, Hunt’s reputation has ignited first in Europe and, like the work of Umberto Eco and Arturo Perez-Reverte, this novel is steeped in mystery, art, madness, and allusions to the contemporary consequences of historical decisions. He is a literary genre-bender of the first order and The Exquisite should solidify his reputation both here and abroad. Hunt’s work is already being taught in contemporary fiction classes and this book should find its way onto a number of course adoption lists.

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A tender love story related in the dark, stylish noir of continental cinema and overlaid with a patina of Surrealism, this is also a mediation about how we cope with unimaginable tragedy (like those of the main characters, one of whom lost their entire family and the other who lost a lover to unspeakable violence) and how we battle the demons that accompany it. The main character describes the buildings of this Barcelona-like, nameless city as “designed by the sort of visionary / crackpot who every generation or so arises in great metropolises and pulls fistfuls of the future out of his pockets and smears them all over the present.” The same could be said of Laird Hunt, a visionary writer, whose work, like Antoni Gaudí’s architecture, heralds the future. Laird Hunt has developed a tech-savvy cult following and is a favorite among literary bloggers. A reading from his debut novel was one of the first live, literary web casts, and the promotion for his previous book included an official filmed trailer (viewable at YouTube) and a video, shot by lit blogger Bud Parr (viewable at Chekov’s Mistress). For this novel, the main characters will be on Twitter and we’ll do some Facebook promotion. Theater students will also film reenactments from the novel for broadcast on YouTube.

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A mesmerizing, poignant saga of love and loss firmly grounded in the Midwestern landscape by National Book Award finalist Laird Hunt.On a dark and lovely winter night, Noah Summers sits before a roaring fire, drifting between sleep and recollection, trying to make sense of a lifetime of psychic visions and his family’s tumultuous history on an Indiana farmstead. Decades have passed since Noah first fell in love with Opal, a brilliant but unstable young woman whose penchant for flames separated the couple after just forty-two idyllic days of married life. Despite the challenges they each faced, their love never wavered in the long years that followed, sustained by letters, memories, and the bonds of family. Indiana, Indiana establishes the world Laird Hunt returned to in National Book Award finalist Zorrie and introduces the character of Zorrie Underwood for the first time. Written in a masterful elegiac style reminiscent of William Faulkner and Marilynne Robinson, Indiana, Indiana is a beautiful and surreal story that illuminates the heart of rural America.

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In this darkest of fairy tales, a young woman sets off to pick berries in the depths of the forest, but can't find her way home again. Or perhaps she has fled or abandoned her family. Or perhaps she's been kidnapped, and set loose to wander in the dense woods of the north. Alone and possibly lost, she meets another woman who offers her help. Then everything changes. On a journey that will take her to the depths of the witch-haunted woods, through a deep well wet with the screams of men, and on a living ship made of human bones, our heroine may find that the evil she flees has been inside her all along.

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Once upon a time there was and there wasn't a woman who went to the woods. In this dark fairy tale, a young woman sets off to pick berries in the depths of the forest, but can't find her way home again. Or perhaps she has fled or abandoned her family. Or perhaps she's been kidnapped, and set loose to wander in the dense woods of the north. Alone and possibly lost, she meets another woman who offers her help. Then everything changes. On a journey that will take her to the depths of the witch-haunted woods, through a deep well wet with the screams of men, and on a living ship made of human bones, our heroine may find that the evil she flees has been inside her all along.

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Finalist for the 2021 National Book Award (Fiction)"It was Indiana, it was the dirt she had bloomed up out of, it was who she was, what she felt, how she thought, what she knew."As a girl, Zorrie Underwood's modest and hardscrabble home county was the only constant in her young life. After losing both her parents, Zorrie moved in with her aunt, whose own death orphaned Zorrie all over again, casting her off into the perilous realities and sublime landscapes of rural, Depression-era Indiana. Drifting west, Zorrie survived on odd jobs, sleeping in barns and under the stars, before finding a position at a radium processing plant. At the end of each day, the girls at her factory glowed from the radioactive material.But when Indiana calls Zorrie home, she finally finds the love and community that have eluded her in and around the small town of Hillisburg. And yet, even as she tries to build a new life, Zorrie discovers that her trials have only begun.Spanning an entire lifetime, a life convulsed and transformed by the events of the 20th century, Laird Hunt's extraordinary novel offers a profound and intimate portrait of the dreams that propel one tenacious woman onward and the losses that she cannot outrun. Set against a harsh, gorgeous, quintessentially American landscape, this is a deeply empathetic and poetic novel that belongs on a shelf with the classics of Willa Cather, Marilynne Robinson, and Elizabeth Strout.

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From National Book Award Finalist Laird Hunt, a masterful collection of interwoven stories capturing one summer's day in Reagan-era Indiana.Candy Wilson has forgotten to buy the paprika. Turner Davis needs to get his zinnias in. Della Dorner told her mother she was going to Milky Freeze, but that's not where she's really headed on her new Schwinn five-speed.Float Up, Sing Down is the story of a single day. But in that day, how much teeming life! The residents of this rural town have their routines, their preferences, their joys, grudges, and regrets. The old-timers savor past triumphs, cast back to lives circumscribed and defined by the World Wars, wonder what might have been. Youngsters covet cars, karate moves, kissing; they writhe in the first blushes of love or pain or independence. Gossip is paramount. Lives are entwined. Retired sheriffs climb corn bins and muse on lost love, French teachers throw firecrackers out of barn windows, and teenagers borrow motorcycles to ride the back roads.Each of the fourteen stories of Float Up, Sing Down follows one character's 'day-in-the-life' in one of Hunt's most beloved and enduring landscapes. As the book unfolds these lives echo and glance off of one another with elegance and warmth, a tenderness born of strength. In the tradition of Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, Elizabeth Strout, and Edward P. Jones, this is a symphony of souls, a masterful portrait of both loneliness and community by one of our great limners of American experience.

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New material in the paperback edition includes an introduction by Percival Everett, an afterword by Laird Hunt, and a "lost chapter." Hunt's experimentation with the novel has made him a major influence for a young generation of novelists. The narrator's wry, self-deprecating humor make this nameless protagonist endearing. Featured in The Believer four years after its publication and named one of the "Underappreciated in 2002 by the same publication, The Impossibly is considered one of those literary gems lost in the turmoil following the 9/11 attacks. Available as an audio book via Iambik.

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