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Jonis wins Editor's Prize for Fiction from Fifth
Wednesday:
True to its title, Jonis Agee’s story
“The Plane of Primary Focus” works like a Mobius strip
of suffering. Right when you think you know where this
chatty aggrieved narrator, who holds you tight by the
lapels, has her sights fixed, you find she and Agee have
placed you in a completely different room. If fiction is
a house, as Henry James suggests, Agee’s story would be
like that of the famously nutty widow, somewhere near
San Jose, California, who kept crafting additions to her
house which were essentially architectural red herrings:
closet doors opening to nothing, stairways doubling upon
themselves. By Agee’s story’s end, we swallow, along
with our surprising narrator, a lump in the throat. The
repressed will return. Yet in Agee’s masterful hands,
this eventuality has less to do with time and more with
that excruciating pain: focus.–Edie Meidav, Judge,
Editor’s Prize for Fiction,
Fifth Wednesday
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Jonis and co-writer Brent Spencer win the Gold Level
Award for their screenplay Baghdad Rules in the
2010 California Film Awards
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Jonis and co-writer Brent Spencer win "Best of Action"
for their screenplay Baghdad Rules in the 2010
Chicago Screenwriters Network Contest. Click
here
for more information. The screenplay was also among the
top 25% of entries for the 2010 Page International
Screenwriting Awards.
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Jonis wins the George Garrett Award for Community
Service from the Association of Writers and Writing
Programs, 2010. Click
here to read more.
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Jonis wins the Outstanding Research and Creativity Award
(ORCA) from the University of Nebraska for 2010. To see
a video about Jonis and the ORCA Award,
click here.
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Jonis Agee wins the Mark Twain Award for Distinguished
Contribution to Midwestern Literature from The Society
for the Study of Midwestern Literature, 2009
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Jonis Agee wins 3rd place in the Silver Screenwriting
Awards for "Everlasting," a script she co-wrote with
husband Brent Spencer. The script was also a
semi-finalist for the Page International Screenwriting
Competition, 2009.
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Jonis wins the Distinguished Artist Award and Backwaters
Press Publication Award from the Nebraska Arts Council,
2008
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Jonis Agee Wins John Gardner Fiction Book Award for 2008
The State University of New York at Binghamton
awarded Jonis its coveted book award for The
River Wife. Judge Vivian Shipley said, "The
River Wife by Jonis Agee grabbed me by the
scruff of my neck, shook me and did not release me
until the last page." [Click
here to read more.]
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River Wife one of 30 Novels Worth Buying for the
Cover Alone!
AbeBooks.com has included The River Wife
among its selection of thirty novels whose covers
alone are enough to make readers swoon. Click the
link above for more details.
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Jonis Agee Wins!
Jonis Agee has won the Mark Twain Award for 2008,
given annually by the Society for the Study of
Midwestern Literature for distinguished
contributions to Midwestern literature. The award
will be presented to Jonis at the organization's
banquet in East Lansing, MI on May 9th as part of
the organization's yearly conference.
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The River Wife by Jonis Agee
by Phil Hey
Briar Cliff Review
April 17, 2008
This book is beautifully, masterfully written, ...
Here, I propose, is where Jonis Agee most earns the
adjective "masterful." It is easy to write pulpy
historical romances, but it is tremendously
difficult to write so that every detail has the ring
and feel of truth, which is what you’ll find here. I
despise finding technical or chronological errors in
fiction; they remind me I’m reading "only" fiction.
One fine sentence after another here, I’m
convinced—as I am with Mark Twain—that this author
knows the territory and won’t settle for less. The
river is right, the dirt and smoke are right, the
dense wetland brush is right, the horses are right,
the way the men use weapons is right, the way the
food is cooked is right ... and the love is too. We
put up with so much from the people we truly love,
and they with us. How else could Annie put up with
husband Jacques' riverman companions, and his use of
slaves to build their house and "Jacques' landing,"
an inn for boatmen? How else could Hedie put up with
Clement's mysterious late-night doings, and what was
it going to cost her in the end? I do not mean to
make The River Wife sound soapy
or bad-romantic, because this author is also expert
in avoiding sentimentalism ... while at the same
time she knows how to grip us page by page, sentence
by sentence, so that we want to read on. Those
limits are where all the Ducharmes seem obliged to
live, notwithstanding the depth and decency of the
women they marry and take to their own limits—giving
this novel a classical unity and authority almost
lost in our time. The River Wife
is not only strongly recommended—it deserves a place
in the modern American canon.
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"Emotions Run Swift in River Wife"
by Susan Kelly
USA Today
August 14, 2007
The setting of Jonis Agee's multigenerational
portrait of a family that definitely is haunted, and
most likely cursed, is a land drenched in somnolent,
seductive beauty and capable of swift, fearsome
violence. The same can be said of many of the
characters in The River Wife, Agee's fifth
novel, a sprawling tale of the women allied—either
through marriage, money or birth—with fur trader and
river pirate Jacques Ducharme. Their lives are
governed by passion, their desires fueled by love,
greed and jealousy. ...
Agee's novel is fascinating. ... Agee is a gifted
storyteller. Life is difficult but never dull in the
house that Jacques built. [Click
here to read more.]
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"Writing History: Jonis Agee Weaves the Pioneer Past
into a New Novel"
by Alden Mudge
Bookpage
August 2007
Jonis Agee didn’t intend for her 10th book,
The River Wife, to become her first historical
novel. Instead, she set out to tell a more
contemporary story of life in the heartland, as she
had done in her 1993 novel Strange Angels,
which was a New York Times Notable Book, and
in her highly praised short story collections
Acts of love on Indigo Road
and Bend This Heart. But sometimes a book has
intentions of its own.
[Click here to read more]
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July 27, 2007. If you see a big red pickup rattling down
the highway from Milwaukee to Oxford, Tennessee, it will
be Jonis fresh from a series of successful readings,
book signings, and media appearances across the Upper
Midwest. She don't stop for nothing, but she slowed down
for us! See "Readings" for more details.
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"River Gothic" by Yvonne Zipp
Christian Science Monitor, July 24, 2007
Pirates, the legacy of slavery, natural history,
romance, and Southern Gothic tradition combine in
Jonis Agee's atmospheric new novel. ... Fans of
Southern Gothic will ... find The River Wife
a savory gumbo of melodrama and beautiful writing.
[Click here to read more]
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The River Wife by Jonis Agee
by Bernadette Murphy
Los Angeles Times
July 20, 2007
"Filled with high Southern
gothic flavor, the narrative is epic in scope,
covering a series of generations and bursting with
entwined layers of plot tension, sex, violence and
intrigue. . . . The writing throughout is lush, as
the author examines the addictive allure of risk,
along with the blessings and curses of family ties,
especially those formed by marriage." [Click
here to read more.]
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The River Wife is #12 on the Heartland
Independent Bestseller List for the week of July 22,
2007 (Based on reporting from the independent
booksellers of the Midwest Booksellers Association, the
Great Lakes Booksellers Association, and Book Sense.)
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"Southern Gothic: A ghost abandoned in the 19th century
finds her voice in the modern age" by
Jennifer Vanderbes
Washington Post Bookworld, July 22, 2007
In the late 19th century, as the United States
struggled to recover from the Civil War and the
spiritualist movement reached its peak, the idea
that a person could be haunted by the past moved
beyond metaphor. Writers such as Willa Cather, Kate
Chopin, Sarah Orne Jewett and Henry James introduced
the supernatural into their work. No longer was the
past conveyed in flashback and dialogue alone; the
past became an actual woman in a blue or white
dress, standing by a window, whispering about how
she'd been wronged. So it's in keeping with the
spirit of that time that in Jonis Agee's The
River Wife, set in 19th-century Missouri, a
wronged woman haunts the story. This engaging novel
traces the loves and losses of three generations of
women. . . . With Annie metaphorically and literally
haunting the novel, Agee seems to suggest that she
cannot be silenced. Literary ghosts are almost
always female, giving voice to those that the living
world has rendered powerless. Just as the ghost in
Toni Morrison's Beloved is an infant and the
narrator of Alice Sebold's The Lovely
Bones is a murdered girl, Annie, although
twice abandoned, is given immortality. [Click
here to read more
(registration required)]
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"Riverside Love, Guilt and Loyalty" by Robin Vidimos
The Denver Post, July 21, 2007
Jonis Agee's The River Wife sprawls across
generations of women and pirate men, enfolding love
and grief and complicity. Agee's narrative is as
deep as it is broad, peopled by finely drawn
characters of thought-provoking complexity. ...
Agee's prose is contemplative and lovely. As Hedie
comes "to hold hands with every dead person" who has
preceded her in her home, she is guided and brought
to understanding by their stories. She is haunted,
both literally and figuratively, by their presence
but these specters bring not fear, but wisdom,
acceptance and peace. [Click
here to read more]
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Get thee behind me, boy wizard! The River Wife
sells out at Jonis's reading at Micawber's Bookstore in
St. Paul! Eager fans were seen "liberating" copies from
the reserve pile!
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The River Wife by Jonis Agee
by Bernadette Murphy
Los Angeles Times
July 20, 2007
"Filled with high Southern
gothic flavor, the narrative is epic in scope,
covering a series of generations and bursting with
entwined layers of plot tension, sex, violence and
intrigue. . . . The writing throughout is lush, as
the author examines the addictive allure of risk,
along with the blessings and curses of family ties,
especially those formed by marriage." [Click
here to read more.]
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"Swift water ahead:
Agee's historical novel runs deep with emotion and
frontier detail"
by Seth Taylor
San Diego Union-Tribune
July 15, 2007
"A historical novel that rewires the rules with a
unique gothic elegance. ...
their struggles with love and family are real, and
their emotions are fierce, thanks to Agee's careful
attention. ... [Agee's] Southern gothic prose is raw
and graceful, as she drenches her characters in
emotions too real to be diffused by a romantic
filter. Men and women fall in love quickly and
viscerally. When mothers lose their children, they
either withdraw and wither, or they lash out with a
murderous temper. Husbands and wives who want to
remain faithful are still fanned by both desire and
guilt. And women in love will sacrifice what's
necessary to push back the wildness of the river."
[Click
here to read more.]
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Publishers Weekly
Review of The River Wife (Starred Review)
Agee (Sweet Eyes; Strange Angels)
delivers an enthralling family saga set in
Missouri's boot heel, a place so remote, "it's as if
the whole state of Missouri has been trying to shake
it off for years, like a vestigial tail."
Seventeen-year-old Hedie Rails arrives in 1930 as
the pregnant bride of Clement Ducharme at his family
estate, but little does Hedie know that she's
carrying on a tradition: in 1811, young Annie Lark
is rescued from the Midwestern New Madrid earthquake
by French fur trapper Jacques Ducharme and becomes
the first "river wife." Hedie discovers this—along
with the dark side of the Ducharme legacy—through
old diaries she finds at the family home. She also
learns of the other women involved with Jacques:
Omah, the freed slave girl who joins him in river
piracy, and Laura, his fortune-hunting second wife
whose daughter, Maddie, is Clement's mother As
Hedie's experiences become increasingly ominous
(where does Clement go at night, and why does he
come home beaten up? Are those footsteps she hears
upstairs?), parallels develop between her life and
those of past river wives. Lush historical detail, a
plot brimming with danger, love and betrayal, and a
magnificent cast (Jacques is larger than life, and
the wives are sassy, sexed-up spitfires) will keep
readers entranced. (July)
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