Download or read book Greetings from Cutler County written by Travis Mulhauser and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2009-04-24 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. The stories take place in Cutler County, Michigan. Most of the characters are young men who think of themselves as losers and outsiders. Short on cash, popularity, and the ambition needed for success, they nevertheless are able to examine their failings with the self-knowing humor and resignation of the perpetually thwarted ne'er-do-well. The stories are inseparable from the stark shoreline of their Lake Michigan settings-the 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.
Download or read book Grand River and Joy written by Susan Messer and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2010-01-14 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "With unsparing candor, Susan Messer thrusts us into a time when racial tensions sundered friends and neighbors and turned families upside down. The confrontations in Grand River and Joy are complex, challenging, bitterly funny, and---painful though it is to acknowledge it---spot-on accurate." ---Rosellen Brown, author of Before and After and Half a Heart "Grand River and Joy is a rare novel of insight and inspiration. It's impossible not to like a book this well-written and meaningful---not to mention as historically significant, humorous, and meditative." ---Laura Kasischke, author of The Life Before Her Eyes and Be Mine Halloween morning 1966, Harry Levine arrives at his wholesale shoe warehouse to find an ethnic slur soaped on the front window. As he scavenges around the sprawling warehouse basement, looking for the supplies he needs to clean the window, he makes more unsettling discoveries: a stash of Black Power literature; marijuana; a new phone line running off his own; and a makeshift living room, arranged by Alvin, the teenaged tenant who lives with his father, Curtis, above the warehouse. Accustomed to sloughing off fears about Detroit's troubled inner-city neighborhood, Harry dismisses the soaped window as a Halloween prank and gradually dismantles “Alvin's lounge” in a silent conversation with the teenaged tenant. Still, these events and discoveries draw him more deeply into the frustrations and fissures permeating his city in the months leading up to the Detroit riots. Grand River and Joy, named after a landmark intersection in Detroit, follows Harry through the intersections of his life and the history of his city. It's a work of fiction set in a world that is anything but fictional, a novel about the intersections between races, classes and religions exploding in the long, hot summers of Detroit in the 1960s. Grand River and Joy is a powerful and moving exploration of one of the most difficult chapters of Michigan history. Susan Messer's fiction and nonfiction have appeared in numerous publications, including Glimmer Train Stories, North American Review, and Colorado Review. She received an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in prose, an Illinois Arts Council literary award for creative nonfiction, and a prize in the Jewish Cultural Writing Competition of the Dora Teitelboim Center for Yiddish Culture. Cover photograph copyright © Bill Rauhauser and Rauhauser Photographic Trust
Download or read book A Spell on the Water written by Marjorie Kowalski Cole and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2011-06-22 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "I couldn't put it down." ---Barbara Kingsolver In 1955, Mary and Jim Leader have the American dream: careers in medicine; a young and healthy family; and even a vacation home---a shabby resort far from bustling Chicago. But one hot afternoon changes everything. Mary, now a widow, must find a path out of her grief into a future for herself and five small children. In Michigan to sell the resort, Mary sees seven hawks riding the storm winds over the lake. This place, she thinks, can heal them with its wild beauty, so she moves her family to the northern lakeshore. But Mary has forgotten what it's like to live in a tiny rural community, where almost everyone has a stake in maintaining the status quo. Secrets are kept at great cost as Mary's children often struggle to raise themselves. A coming-of-age story for each member of the family, this is a novel of quiet heroism and the power of personal freedom. Praise for Marjorie Kowalski Cole and her previous novel, Correcting the Landscape: ". . . her writing is simple, vivid and gorgeous." ---Eugene Register-Guard ". . . a remarkable new talent. Critics have lined up to praise the book." ---Tucson Citizen "Cole's style is subtle but engrossing . . . It is quite a debut." ---Booklist Cover illustration: ©iStockphoto.com/ImagineGolf
Download or read book One Mile Past Dangerous Curve written by Darrell Spencer and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2009-08-13 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Praise for One Mile Past Dangerous Curve: "This book aims to be about the best of us as it shows us at our least. Thank goodness for Darrell Spencer, the only writer in America to be trusted on the subjects of faith, love, weal and woe." ---Lee K. Abbott " . . . absolutely dire and dear, his best book, a novel about American life right now. . . . this book is accurate, acerbic, and heartfelt at once." ---Ron Carlson Praise for Darrell Spencer: "Mr. Spencer's writing crackles with freshness and lucidity, featuring characters who slide into one another in random encounters and relationships." ---New York Times Book Review "[Spencer] possesses a remarkable ear for the cadence of everyday speech." ---Michael Chabon From the acclaimed author of Caution: Men in Trees and A Woman Packing a Pistol comes a tale of kinship, love, and lawlessness. One Mile Past Dangerous Curve is the story of the Dancers---a family on the verge of collapse. Glen Dancer has come to Ohio to set up another in a series of Snapper franchises. But in the midst of construction, Glen finds himself fighting a painful and futile battle with cancer. His son Eddie, recently divorced, moves from Las Vegas to help. A sign painter by trade, Eddie finds only intermittent work in town until the day a mysterious and wealthy businessman commissions a series of twenty road signs, each different, all featuring odd, cryptic messages. It is on a back-country road, where Eddie has gone to assemble one of the signs, that some previously vague threats become concrete. Though Eddie doesn't know it, the neighboring woods hide a secret, a secret that a gun-toting rural gang wants to keep at any cost.
Download or read book Lebanese Blonde written by Joseph Geha and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2012-07-30 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lebanese Blondetakes place in 1975-76 at the beginning of Lebanon's sectarian civil war. Set primarily in the Toledo, Ohio, "Little Syria" community, it is the story of two immigrant cousins: Aboodeh, a self-styled entrepreneur; and Samir, his young, reluctant accomplice. Together the two concoct a scheme to import Lebanese Blonde, a potent strain of hashish, into the United States, using the family's mortuary business as a cover. When Teyib, a newly arrived war refugee, stumbles onto their plans, his clumsy efforts to gain acceptance raise suspicion. Who is this mysterious "cousin," and what dangers does his presence pose? Aboodeh and Samir's problems grow still more serious when a shipment goes awry and their links to the war-ravaged homeland are severed. Soon it's not just Aboodeh and Samir's livelihoods and futures that are imperiled, but the stability of the entire family.
Download or read book cutting teeth written by K.J. Stevens and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2011-09-20 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of fiction and nonfiction by KJ Stevens.
Download or read book How Like an Angel written by Jack Driscoll and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2009-04-23 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "How Like an Angel is a powerfully imagined, lyrically wrought novel, overflowing with the senses. Jack Driscoll is a marvel." ---Rick Bass "How Like an Angel is a lyrical, lonely ode to fatherhood, an aria in words that looks forward and backward at once. Jack Driscoll is a writer of deep heart, relentless honesty, uncanny gentleness, and irresistible spirit." ---Pam Houston How Like an Angel is the story of Archibald Angel. With his career going nowhere and a marriage in decline, Angel retreats to a rustic cabin in northern Michigan to make a new life for himself. In spite of his forward thinking, Angel's move is in many ways a journey into the past. Besides lacking modern comforts, the cabin conjures the ghost of Angel's troubled childhood, when his undertaker father took the cabin in trade as payment from a widow who couldn't otherwise afford the cost of her husband's burial. After Angel's mother subsequently fled, abandoning her family to recover from a mental breakdown, the cabin was an escape for father and son. While Archibald Angel revisits his knotted and difficult past, his ex-wife and young son contemplate their future. Slowly, with unexpected help from an unpredictable woman, Angel realizes he too must find a way to begin again or risk failing his son as his own father failed him. With pathos, humor, and unflagging generosity of spirit, How Like an Angel takes us deep into the hinterland of the human heart and discovers there the source of the love that keeps us holding on against all odds.
Download or read book Documents Including Messages and Other Communications Made to the General Assembly of the State of Ohio written by Ohio and published by . This book was released on 1847 with total page 752 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Messages and Proclamations of the Governors of Iowa written by Iowa. Governors and published by . This book was released on 1905 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Messages and Proclamations of the Governors of Iowa written by Iowa. Governor and published by . This book was released on 1905 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Documents Including Messages and Other Communications written by Ohio and published by . This book was released on 1867 with total page 746 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Giants in Their Tall Black Hats written by Kent Gramm and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1998-10-22 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume of essays by renowned Civil War historians provides a comprehensive history of the legendary Iron Brigade and its service to the Union. Fighting in the Civil War for the Union Army of the Potomac, Brigadier General Rufus King’s Wisconsin Brigade was the only all-Western Brigade to fight for the Eastern armies of the Union. Known as "The Black Hat Brigade" because the soldiers wore the regular army’s dress black hat instead of the more typical blue cap, they were renowned for their discipline and valor in combat. From Brawner Farm and Second Bull Run to Chancellorsville and Gettysburg, the Western soldiers were giants of the battlefield, earning their reputation as “The Iron Brigade.” And when the war was over, the records showed that it led all federal brigades in percentage of deaths in battle. These essays, by some of the most renowned Civil War historians and experts on the brigade, spotlight significant moments in the history of this celebrated unit. "Editors Alan Nolan and Sharon Eggleston Vipond's insightful essays provide fresh perspectives on the Iron Brigade's exploits, detailing military and political events in the words of actual combatants."—Military Review
Download or read book Messages to the Legislature written by Kansas. Governor and published by . This book was released on 1871 with total page 1516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes annual, biennial and special messages, inaugural addresses and speeches, etc. before the Legislature.
Download or read book Sweetgirl written by Travis Mulhauser and published by Ecco. This book was released on 2016-02-02 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the heart, daring, and evocative atmosphere of Winter’s Bone and True Grit, and driven by the raw, whip-smart voice of Percy James, a blistering debut about a fearless sixteen-year old girl whose search for her missing mother leads to an unexpected discovery, and a life or death struggle in the harsh frozen landscape of the Upper Midwest. As a blizzard bears down, Percy James sets off to find her troubled mother, Carletta. For years, Percy has had to take care of herself and Mama—a woman who’s been unraveling for as long as her daughter can remember. Fearing Carletta is strung out on meth and that she won’t survive the storm, Percy heads for Shelton Potter’s cabin, deep in the woods of Northern Michigan. A two-bit criminal, as incompetent as he his violent, Shelton has been smoking his own cook and grieving the death of his beloved Labrador, Old Bo. But when Percy arrives, there is no sign of Carletta. Searching the house, she finds Shelton and his girlfriend drugged into oblivion—and a crying baby girl left alone in a freezing room upstairs. From the moment the baby wraps a tiny hand around her finger, Percy knows she must save her—a split-second decision that is the beginning of a dangerous odyssey in which she must battle the elements and evade Shelton and a small band of desperate criminals, hell-bent on getting that baby back. Knowing she and the child cannot make it alone, Percy seeks help from Carletta’s ex, Portis Dale, who is the closest thing she’s ever had to a father. As the storm breaks and violence erupts, Percy will be forced to confront the haunting nature of her mother’s affliction and finds her own fate tied more and more inextricably to the baby she is determined to save. Filled with the sweeping sense of cultural and geographic isolation of its setting—the hills of fictional Cutler County in northern Michigan—and told in Percy’s unflinching style, Sweetgirl is an affecting exploration of courage, sacrifice, and the ties that bind—a taut and darkly humorous tour-de-force that is horrifying, tender, and hopeful.
Download or read book Great Lakes and Midwest Catalog written by Partners Book Distributing and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Messages and Documents written by Oregon. Legislative Assembly. House of Representatives and published by . This book was released on 1870 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Messages and Documents written by Oregon and published by . This book was released on 1870 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: