Though the best American writers live everywhere now, a popular fiction
persists: our strongest literary voices are strictly bi-coastal ones.
Barnstorm sets out to disprove that cliché and to undermine another
one as well: the sense of regional fiction as something quaint, slightly
regressive, and full of local color. The stories in this collection
capture our global reality with a ruthless, unaffected voice. Lorrie
Moore's "The Jewish Hunter" is a dark romance that's by turns cynical
and guileless. Mack Friedman catches the smoking feel of first love in
his "Setting the Lawn on Fire," and Jesse Lee Kercheval's "Brazil" is a
raucous, ultimately mournful road trip. For Jane Hamilton, Wisconsin is
a gorgeous but bittersweet homecoming, and for Kelly Cherry, in her
achingly elegiac "As It Is in Heaven," it's the hopeful new world,
juxtaposed with a bleak, tweedy England. Dwight Allen's "The Green Suit"
evokes the young man edging toward adulthood, in a New York that's as
flamboyant as an opera, and Tenaya Darlington, in her "A Patch of Skin,"
constructs a pure horror story, because the horror of loneliness is
something we all know. Together Barnstorm's eclectic voices suggest
that every coast now, even the Great Lakes' shores, are at the very
center of our best, and truest, national literature.
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