The Woman Lit by Fireflies
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
Three novellas by the author of Legends of the Fall. “A brilliant tour de force . . . Jim Harrison at his peak: comic, erotic, and insightful” (San Francisco Chronicle).
Across the odd contours of the American landscape, people are searching for the things that aren’t irretrievably lost, for the incandescent beneath the ordinary. An ex-Bible student with raucously asocial tendencies rescues the preserved body of an Indian chief from the frigid depths of Lake Superior in a caper that nets a wildly unexpected bounty. A band of sixties radicals, now approaching middle age, reunite to free an old comrade from a Mexican jail. A fifty-year-old suburban housewife flees quietly from her abusive businessman husband at a highway rest stop, climbs a fence, and explores the bittersweet pageant of the preceding years within the sanctuary of an Iowa cornfield.
The Woman Lit by Fireflies is the work of a classic writer at the very top of his form—a hard-living, hard-writing hero of American letters whose novellas comprise a sweeping tribute to the nation’s heartland and the colorful, courageous characters who inhabit it.
“Funny, wild, sexy, and bizarre . . . Along with Richard Ford . . . Harrison has cornered the market in the tough-but-tender style that characterized Hemingway’s early work.” —Nick Hornby
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Michigan poet and novelist Harrison ( Sundog ; Dalva ) spins three novellas in this volume. In ``Brown Dog,'' with its traits of an epic tall tale, B.D. is a rough-hewn, hard-drinking diver for an illegal scavenging firm who dredges up the body of an Indian from Lake Superior. Intending to sell the cadaver to a collector, he instead develops a filial bond with the Indian. B.D.'s weakness for fine women further entangles him with urbane anthropologist Shelley, yet he hankers for Rose, his earthy first love who threw pig swill at him. ``Sunset Limited,'' contoured like a thriller, reunites four old friends, a ``wild bunch'' of '60s radicals once jailed for wrecking draft records, who, settled and affluent, must reassess their lives and relationships when called on to rescue an unregenerate ex-cohort from a Mexican jail. The title story depicts Clare, 50, in abrupt flight from her bigoted husband, hiding in an Iowa cornfield during a soul-searching night. In each novella the past rises up to challenge these deeply probed characters, forcing them to make moral choices.