![Float Up, Sing Down](/assets/artwork/1x1-42817eea7ade52607a760cbee00d1495.gif)
![Float Up, Sing Down](/assets/artwork/1x1-42817eea7ade52607a760cbee00d1495.gif)
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Float Up, Sing Down
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- 18,99 €
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- 18,99 €
Publisher Description
Laird Hunt's masterful story collection capturing one summer's day in the Indiana community where the beloved National Book Award Finalist Zorrie bloomed.
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 the Galaxy Swirl, 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. 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. 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hunt's amiable collection of 14 interconnected character studies (after Zorrie) is set over the course of one day in the early 1980s. The connective tissue of the stories, each of which is titled after its protagonist, is the characters' Indiana hamlet, friendly on the surface but riven with subterranean traumas. Candy, an older woman who hosts the monthly bingo club, was close with Irma, who has recently died by suicide. Horace, a bachelor, is a WWII veteran and retired farmer who mows the lawn and goes for a walk to avoid dwelling on his combat experiences on D-Day. Della is a high school student training for the track team who secretly meets classmate Sugar Henry in his parents' barn, where she trades him kisses for Kraft Cheese Singles. A young man named Toby, whom Hunt implies is neurodivergent, derives satisfaction from the people who honk at the signs he holds on the side of the road ("Honk If You Love the Gipper"; "Honk If You Love Jesus"). Though Hunt's portraits don't quite cohere into a narrative, they do convincingly capture the era and a sense of place. Fans of Hunt's previous small-town studies will appreciate these lovingly drawn portraits.