"Savagely entertaining characters... adept humor and impeccable prose. [Readers] come away with the feeling of having had a true encounter with the fantastic." -Alissa Nutting, author of Made for Love
B.J. Hollars's debut short story collection offers ten thematically linked tales, all of which are out to subvert conventional notions of the Midwestern coming-of-age story.
They feature an assemblage of Bigfoot believers, Civil War reenactors, misidentified Eskimos, and grief-stricken clowns, among other outcasts incapable of finding a place in their worlds. In these marvelous stories, we can join a family on a very 21st-century trip along the Oregon Trail, watch as a boy builds a brother from a vacuum cleaner, follow a sandlot baseball team as it struggles to overcome an invasion by its Native American neighbors, and experience how a high school basketball squad takes to Sasquatch roaming its court. This genre-bending collection charts a bizarre pathway through the thickets of life on the road to adulthood. Pushing the limits of realism, these stories capture the peculiar rites of passage of growing up Midwestern.
"An imaginatively sculpted collection of absurdist concepts applied liberally to the equally preposterous notion of growing up." - Kirkus Reviews

2014 AAUP Public and Secondary School Library Selection

B. J. Hollars is author of Thirteen Loops: Race, Violence and the Last Lynching in America and Opening the Doors: The Desegregation of the University of Alabama and the Fight for Civil Rights in Tuscaloosa. He is editor of You Must Be This Tall to Ride: Contemporary Writers Take You Inside the Story, Monsters: A Collection of Literary Sightings, and Blurring the Boundaries: Explorations to the Fringes of Nonfiction. He is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.

B. J. Hollars's debut short story collection offers ten thematically linked tales, all of which are out to subvert conventional notions of the Midwestern coming-of-age story. The stories feature an assemblage of Bigfoot believers, Civil War reenactors, misidentified Eskimos, and grief-stricken clowns, among other outcasts incapable of finding a place in their worlds. In these marvelous stories, we can join a family on a very 21st-century trip along the Oregon Trail, watch as a boy builds a brother from a vacuum cleaner, follow a sandlot baseball team as it struggles to overcome an invasion by its Native American neighbors, and experience how a high school basketball squad takes to Sasquatch roaming its court. This genre-bending collection charts a bizarre pathway through the thickets of life on the road to adulthood. Pushing the limits of realism, these stories capture the peculiar rites of passage of growing up Midwestern.

Acknowledgments

Indian Village
Schooners
Sightings
Westward Expansion
The Clowns
Line of Scrimmage
Dixie Land
Loose Lips Sink Ships
Robotics
Missing Mary