Search results for ""author jonis agee""

No one is better than Jonis Agee at capturing the bone-deep desire and big-eyed longing of a hardscrabble, small-town life. This major collection, highlighting Agee’s astonishing literary achievements, includes powerful new stories and a comprehensive selection from her critically acclaimed books Pretend We’ve Never Met, Bend This Heart, A .38 Special and a Broken Heart, and Taking the Wall. Jonis Agee’s stories are as broad as their landscape, spanning the Great Lakes and traveling through the Great Plains on a straight shot to the heart. The New York Times refers to Agee’s short fiction as the ". . . clear-eyed reports of someone who sees things as they are, not as she would wish them to be" and each story in this collection is raw, deeply memorable, and dedicated to brutally introspective and truthful moments. In Acts of Love on Indigo Road, Agee’s characters continue to dream big and love deep while rushing headlong into the awareness that, finally, there are "only the dead to bear witness to what acts of love can do to the world." "In story after story, the mask drops away from gen-tility, and we come face to face with the truth. These -stories are beautiful because of their courage: there is nothing they are afraid to say."—Charles Baxter on Bend This Heart Jonis Agee is the author of four novels, four collections of short fiction, and a book of poetry. Three of her books—Strange Angels, Bend This Heart, and Sweet Eyes—were named Notable Books of the Year by The New York Times. Taking the Wall won the ForeWord Magazine Editor’s Choice Award and The Weight of Dreams won the Nebraska Book Award. Jonis Agee is a Nebraska native who has lived and taught throughout the Midwest. She is now Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska—Lincoln.

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The award-winning author of The River Wife returns with a multigenerational family saga set in the unforgiving Nebraska Sand Hills in the years following the massacre at Wounded Knee-an ambitious tale of history, vengeance, race, guilt, betrayal, family, and belonging, filled with a vivid cast of characters shaped by violence, love, and a desperate loyalty to the land. Ten years after the Seventh Cavalry massacred more than two hundred Lakota men, women, and children at Wounded Knee, J.B. Bennett, a white rancher, and Star, a young Native American woman, are murdered in a remote meadow on J.B.'s land. The deaths bring together the scattered members of the Bennett family: J.B.'s cunning and hard father, Drum; his estranged wife, Dulcinea; and his teenage sons, Cullen and Hayward. As the mystery of these twin deaths unfolds, the history of the dysfunctional Bennetts and their damning secrets is revealed, exposing the conflicted heart of a nation caught between past and future. At the center of The Bones of Paradise are two remarkable women. Dulcinea, returned after bitter years of self-exile, yearns for redemption and the courage to mend her broken family and reclaim the land that is rightfully hers. Rose, scarred by the terrible slaughters that have decimated and dislocated her people, struggles to accept the death of her sister, Star, and refuses to rest until she is avenged. A kaleidoscopic portrait of misfits, schemers, chancers, and dreamers, Jonis Agee's bold novel is a panorama of America at the dawn of a new century. A beautiful evocation of this magnificent, blood-soaked land-its sweeping prairies, seas of golden grass, and sandy hills, all at the mercy of two unpredictable and terrifying forces, weather and lawlessness-and the durable men and women who dared to tame it. Intimate and epic, The Bones of Paradise is a remarkable achievement: a mystery, a tragedy, a romance, and an unflagging exploration of the beauty and brutality, tenderness and cruelty that defined the settling of the American West.

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