The River Wife
Copyright © 2007
by Jonis Agee
Random House
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From acclaimed novelist Jonis Agee, whom The New York Times Book Review called "a gifted
poet of that dark lushness in the heart of the American landscape," comes the sweeping story of
four generations of women that unfolds along the current and the shores of the mighty Mississippi
river.
In 1811, when a great earthquake rocks the peaceful cove of New Madrid, Missouri, Annie Lark
finds herself pinned under the massive roof beam of her home. With little hope of freeing their
trapped daughter, and the river rapidly rising, the family says a final, tearful goodbye and
leaves the young woman to her fate. Within days, French fur trapper Jacques Ducharme, out
scavenging nearby abandoned houses, rescues the girl from the brink of death and nurses
her back to health. Soon, Annie learns to love this strong, brooding man and resolves to
live out her life as his River Wife. Together they build a new community called "Jacques' Landing."
More than a century later, in 1930, Hedie Rails comes to Jacques' Landing to marry Clement
Ducharme, a direct descendent of the fur trapper and river pirate. The young couple begins their
life together in the very house Jacques built for Annie so long ago. When, night after late night,
mysterious phone calls take Clement from their home, a pregnant Hedie finds comfort in Annie's
old leather bound journals. But when the pages tell of sinister dealings and horrendous
misunderstandings that spelled out tragedy for the rescued bride, Hedie fears that her
own life is paralleling Annie's, and that history is repeating itself with Jacques' kin.
But the journal entries do not end with Annie. Emerging from the pages are three other women who
helped to shape Jacques Ducharme's life — Omah, the freed slave who joins his side as a
river raider; his second wife, Laura; and their daughter, Maddie. Each relay the haunting tale of
this enigmatic, industrious, and ultimately dangerous man, their stories weaving together with
Hedie's, as the journals serve not only as a guide to the newest River Wife at Jacques' Landing,
but also, perhaps, a warning.
Jonis Agee vividly portrays a lineage of love and heartbreak, passion and deceit against the
backdrop of the nineteenth-century South. The five women of The River Wife come to
discover that blind devotion cannot keep the truth at bay, nor the past from flowing into
the present. — from the publisher
Make sandwiches and turn off the phone, because The River Wife is a novel you won't put down.
It is a capacious, robust story grounded in a fascinating time and place, written at a high
pitch with firm control. The women are terrific, the men are crazed, the dogs and horses are
as real as people. With her mythic vision, Agee has created a whole new version of family out
of catastrophe, passion, treachery and blood. — Sandra Scofield, author of Occasions of Sin
The River Wife is a stunning saga that sweeps you up in its mystery, its
meticulous accounting of period details, its pinpoint plotting, and its clear-eyed
evocation of character and place. Jonis Agee has written a novel, in the tradition of
Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, that brings an unforgettable family to life and
traces their deeds and consequences through four generations. The Ducharme women are
strong enough to survive all manner of evil, and tender enough to never lose sight of the
human spirit. This story of secrets, ghosts, courage, and family will grab hold of you
from the first page and hold you to the gorgeous and haunting end. —
Lee Martin, author of The Bright Forever
The charismatic, wicked, unstoppable Jacques Ducharme, loved and feared along a lawless stretch
of the Mississippi River, "put together a life from his own fearlessness," and generations of
women, and men too, lived and loved and suffered under his spell. This vivid and original tale
reminds us that for better or worse, we are products of those whose name or blood or land or
ambitions we share. Jonis Agee is a marvelous storyteller, and The River Wife is a
complex and irresistible saga in the tradition of classic Southern fiction. —
Susan Vreeland, Girl in Hyacinth Blue and Luncheon of the Boating Party
The River Wife is an ambitious multigenerational family saga about the women in a
Mississippi river pirate's life. Jonis Agee shows us a world hauntingly askew, filled with
secrets, heartbreaking love, even buried treasure. She transports the reader to a vivid
and often violent past that spills onto the new — and often unsuspecting — generations
in both tragic and triumphant ways. — Lisa See, bestselling author of
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
What a grand and gorgeous novel this is: passionate, stirring, filled with action,
intrigue, romance, and surprise. Jonis Agee's The River Wife is glorious. —
Ron Hansen, author of Mariette in Ecstasy, Atticus, Isn't It Romantic?
This is the book keeping me up nights. — Birchbark Books
Agee's long-awaited fifth novel is more than simply a work of fiction; rather, it's an
all-consuming experience. This mesmerizing saga teeming with memorable characters, sharp
depictions of frontier life, and lucid, beautifully wrought prose will haunt readers long
afterward. — Booklist
Agee delivers an enthralling family saga. ... Lush historical detail, a plot brimming
with danger, love and betrayal, and a magnificent cast. — Publishers Weekly
(starred review)
A catfish stew of a novel . . . addictive. — Kirkus Reviews
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. —
San Diego Union-Tribune
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. — Los Angeles Times
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. — Denver Post
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. — Washington Post Bookworld
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. —
Christian Science Monitor
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. USA Today
This is the book keeping me up nights. — Birchbark Books
The unforgettable characters, the violent emotions and the historical sweep combine to
make The River Wife her finest work to date, a masterpiece of historical fiction
to be savored by all who love fine writing. — Sandra K Toro, Mobile Press-Register
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. — Phil Hey,
Briar Cliff Review
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Acts of Love on Indigo Road
Copyright © 2003
by Jonis Agee
Coffee House Press
How to Buy
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In this stellar collection, Jonis Agee explores all the detours on the crooked road of love.
No one is better than Jonis Agee at capturing the bone-deep desire and big-eyed longing of a
hardscrabble, small-town life. This major collection, highlighting Agee's astonishing literary
achievements, includes powerful new stories and a comprehensive selection from her critically
acclaimed books Pretend We've Never Met, Bend This Heart, A .38 Special and a Broken Heart, and
Taking the Wall.
Jonis Agee's stories are as broad as their landscape, spanning the Great Lakes and traveling
through the Great Plains on a straight shot to the heart. The New York Times refers to Agee's
short fiction as the "... clear-eyed reports of someone who sees things as they are, not as she
would wish them to be" and each story in this collection is raw, deeply memorable, and
dedicated to brutally introspective and truthful moments.
In Acts of Love on Indigo Road, Agee's characters continue to dream big and love deep while
rushing headlong into the awareness that, finally, there are "only the dead to bear witness to
what acts of love can do to the world." — from the jacket
In this collection of extremely short stories, novelist and story writer Agee
... offers little glimpses into the desperate lives
of people living on the edge. This it not say that these stories are without hope but that
sometimes victories can be so small as to be apparent only to the victor.
Often, the stories take place in dying towns in remote locales. ...
Agee writes convincingly, often in the first person, from both male
and female perspectives and spanning generations. In addition to 25 new stories, this
volume includes selected stories from four previous collections, including Taking the
Wall and A 38. Special and a Broken Heart,
which is a real bonus for smaller libraries. Recommended for all short story collections.
— Library Journal
Terse, edgy and explosive. ... Agee's flair for stunning conceits and turn-on-a-dime
plotting dominates throughout, and her feel for
the gritty underbelly of blue-collar American life belies an equally impressive
talent for poetic, elegiac writing. ... an unsentimental
chronicler of desperate people trying to find happiness with the odds stacked
against them. — Publishers Weekly
Jonis Agee's short stories are thick with the dirt and gravel of small towns, fast cars and people straining to
make sense of one another. Her characters, most of them living in the Midwest, are cleareyed about their
less-than-perfect lives. Where they turn for solace becomes the defining moment in many of these stories,
almost half of which are new, the rest pulled from her previous collections. Particularly haunting and surreal
is "The Waiting," in which a plane crash and the resulting array of corpses and personal objects has an unusual
effect on a community of old folks whose kids have moved away and forgotten them. In "Good to Go," Agee
uses agile but homespun metaphors to unpack the fate of a car-racing family whose good luck lasted a year
and a half, with dreams "tumbling out hot and fresh like clothes from the dryer." By turns desperate and
moving, Agee's stories are fine-tuned to a certain eccentric kind of small-town America. —
New York Times Book Review
Agee specializes in
sharp-edged, unsentimental miniatures. ...
Agee's stories are trenchantly witty and eloquent
evocations of the close-to-the-bone lives of housebound
women and speed-craving men: farmers and picklers and
orchardists, men who live in storage units and
trackside trailers, the two wives of a bigamist who
meet to compare notes. Acts of Love on Indigo Road is a
very fine compendium of two decades of work. —
Washington Post
Jonis Agee writes of life on the edge of the
blue collar. The guy who runs the fix-it shop. The waitress with the thin
hair and big heart. The revved-up dreams of a demolition derby family.
In Acts of Love on Indigo Road, Agee collects new and previously published
work in an enjoyable career showcase. — Midwest Living
Memorable and pungent characters. Agee's clear, lucid
prose offers a poised clarity in stories that may be bitter,
darkly humorous or matter-of-fact. No matter, these are stories
about real people. What makes this collection special is the
humanity
Agee weaves into each story. — Lincoln Journal Star
Acts Of Love On Indigo Road is an anthology of new and selected
short stories by acclaimed author Jonis Agee that poignantly
epitomize small-town life, and dealing with daily trials while
striving for something more. Humble yet involving narratives
fill the pages of this emotional and evocative collection.
Acts Of Love On Indigo Road is an impressive and extraordinary
anthology which is a "must read" for Jonis Agee fans and admirers.
— Midwest Book Review
Compelling entertainment. ... Agee's at her best when she's most
subtle, as in two of the new stories, "Cleveland Pinkney" and "Earl,"
both brief, guarded snapshots of betrayal, where blue-collar realism
is touched with a bit of impressionistic mystery, and the moment of
truth — whatever it will be — lies just outside
the margins of the story. — Minneapolis Star Tribune
Agee specializes in short, short stories that rarely go beyond five pages. Her characters are
often small-town and rural folks who work hard and sometimes dangerously. ...
Agee's stories are powerful because of what she leaves unsaid.
— St Paul Pioneer Press
Many of the residents on Indigo Road —
a place just beyond the pavement where the
road turns to gravel or dirt — are down a lap
but not out of the race. Those who populate the 25 new stories in
this collection work dead-end jobs, make ends meet, and they make
do in love, despite its sometimes glaring imperfections. In Indigo
Road, readers will find both humanity and hope as characters
chase love and each other with all the optimism of a dog let loose
on the trail of a passing car on a dusty road. —
Minnesota Women's Press
At their
best, her fictions are wonders of concision, expert in the way they distill the lives
and crises of her mainly blue-collar, small-town characters. ... Agee¹s stories are
trenchantly witty and eloquent evocations of the close-to-the-bone lives of housebound
women and speed-craving men: farmers and picklers and orchardists, men who live in
storage units and trackside trailers, the two wives of a bigamist who meet to compare
notes. Acts of Love on Indigo Road is a very fine compendium of two decades of work.
Literature at its best — The Examiner
Acts Of Love On Indigo Road is an anthology of new and
selected short stories by acclaimed author Jonis Agee
that poignantly epitomize small-town life, and dealing
with daily trials while striving for something more.
Humble yet involving narratives fill the pages of this
emotional and evocative collection. Acts Of Love On
Indigo Road is an impressive and extraordinary
anthology which is a "must read" for Jonis Agee fans
and admirers. — Vacation Book Reviews
... wryly sympathetic tales ... Ann Arbor Observer
The Nebraska native ... has staked a claim as small-press fiction's
correspondent among the blue-collar set that spends its weekends
down at the track. — The Rake
If it is possible for a writer as good as Jonis Agee to grow even leaner, meaner, and narrate even darker devastating
truths about dead-end lives with luck gone sour than she ever has, this is it. ...
she's broken the craft of traditional storytelling wide
open with her short-short fiction format. Acts of Love on Indigo Road is a marvelous
compliation spanning a quarter-century of Agee's fiction-making. ...
Like the equally hardened, scorched, wind-swept, and ice-pick-sharp prose of Annie Proulx, another western female
author who knows what gritty love is all about; and like the grotesque and gothic misfits of Flannery O'Connor, who are
haunted equally by death and by life; and like Terry Tempest Williams, mining ancestral landscapes of her soul in
southwestern geography, Agee buries her mind's fingers deep into soil and psyches, and does not blanch from ugliness
or danger, from physical or spiritual nakedness: it's jolting addiction, pared down to the bone. —
North Dakota Quarterly
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Sweet Eyes
Copyright © 2003
by Jonis Agee
Bison Books/U of Nebraska P
How to Buy
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"What I wanted to do was to convey an archetypal female experience, I wanted to show
what it was like for
a woman to go on an inner journey that did not necessarily lead to the
domestic." — Jonis Agee
Agee skillfully braids present and past into a rich, meaty tale that captures American
small-town life. ... This
is a multileveled and sensitive novel about victimization and the struggle to defeat
it. ... She clearly shows
herself to be a significant new novelist. — Chicago Tribune
There's enough sprawling vivacity here to let Agee do for Divinity, Iowa, what Larry
McMurtry does for
Texasville: create a comfortable, lived-in world. — Kirkus Reviews
Sweet Eyes is not The Divine Comedy, but this extraordinary first novel
echoes that masterpiece's ambition
to map the moral geography of the world. Confining herself to the small-town life of
Divinity, Iowa, Agee's
narrator, Honey Parrish, passionately struggles to sort good from evil in the struggle
for a better life. ... A big,
complicated book about small-town life, in the great American tradition of Faulkner,
Willa Cather, and Sherwood
Anderson — Philadelphia Inquirer
Jonis Agee has taken possession of small-town America. She knows the seasons of the
countryside and both
the beauty and ferocity of America's heartland. Honey Parrish,
Agee's heroine, not only sees the complex relationships of her town, but tells us about
them with humor and
pathos. Sweet Eyes is a strong, assured performance. — Lawrence Thornton
Sweet Eyes may come as startling news to those who think nothing much goes on between
America's coasts.
Divinity, Iowa, is a boisterous traffic jam of human desires and follies, secrets and
squabbles. And Jonis Agee
depicts the rural backdrop so keenly that, beneath the noisy lives of her amazing
characters, you'll swear you
can hear the corn
grow. — Susan Dodd
While Agee demonstrates that the roots of psychosis and violence so often start within
the family, she also
makes a case for the family's importance and for the necessity of
self-esteem — writing with fearless precision and evocative detail. —
Publishers Weekly
Agee has a fine ear for dialog, and the pacing of this novel is sure. It is also fun to
read, with prose as clean
as the edge of a new spade. — Library Journal
Ms Agee's novel takes us through a year in Divinity, from the April snowstorm when
Honey first becomes
involved with Jasper to the summer of the following year and the
centennial parade. That progress is appropriate: it is in the midst of nature, in
harmony with the seasons,
their months threaded together by the Fourth of July or Appreciation Day or a
Halloween dance, that these
people live. Most of them are farmers, they live in nature, with the weather,
their shoes thick with mud and
manure. That physical closeness to the natural world underscores all the best
imagery in Sweet Eyes. Agee
gives us an urgent sense of the primitive force of life, of the oppression of
heredity and of the fundamentals
of human nature. ... Ms Agee is a gifted poet of that dark lushness in the
heart of the American
landscape. — New York Times Book Review
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The Weight of Dreams
Copyright © 1999
by Jonis Agee
Penguin
How to Buy
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Jonis Agee's acclaimed fiction has established her as a visceral, lyrical
interpreter of the interplay between
family legends and reality, the land and its inhabitants, the forces of nature
and those of the human heart.
Her landscapes are primitive, her characters intense and magnetic, her themes
mythic even as she "celebrates
the gritty, scarred layers of the daily world with specificity and wisdom"
(Chicago Tribune). In The Weight
of Dreams, she has written a compelling tale about a young man caught between
desire and responsibility
who learns that the power of human dignity is far greater than that of money or
social standing.
At seventeen, Ty Bonte's life revolves around the seasons and the work to
be done on his father's Nebraska Sandhills ranch. Long abandoned by his mother
for the
comforts of town life, Ty learns from his father that violence is as much a part
of being a man as hard work.
When he and his drinking buddy, Harney Rivers, beat up two young Indians from the
nearby Rosebud
Reservation and leave them to die, Ty flees from home and the arrest warrant that
has been issued for
their crime.
Ty settles in Kansas, making a quiet but good living as a horse trader.
Reinventing himself as his
own kind of man, he tries to forget his past — the sudden death of
his brother, the rejection by his
mother, the drunken beatings by his father, and the night he and Harney
drove onto the Rosebud
Reservation. He takes in Dakota Carlyle, a woman who seems to find solace in
horses but rarely
in people and who has her own past. But before Ty and Dakota have a chance
to make a life for
themselves, Harney Rivers
suddenly reappears and commits an act of shattering brutality that forces Ty to
return to Nebraska. His
quest for retribution, resolution, and redemption culminates in a furious and
mesmerizing courtroom battle
between the two men.
The Weight of Dreams is a tale of greed, power, and violence, and of a
land that is as brutal and
strong as its inhabitants. It confirms yet again that Agee is "a gifted
poet of
that dark lushness in the heart of the American landscape" (The New York Times
Book Review). — from
the jacket
Here's the real novel for horse lovers. And here is a riveting story, shot
through with sorrow, passion, a
portrait of the disappearing West, a boyhood out of Dickens, and a most satisfying
romance. It's Jonis Agee at her best. — Frederick Busch
An engaging, mysterious and ultimately moving book. Agee knows the geography cold,
both physical
and emotional. She peels back the stereotypes and with startling clarity allows
us to look in on the
slow-motion moments upon which whole lives turn. — Tom McNeal
With its contemporary story, this marvelous and haunting novel captures perfectly
the history of
American Indians and Anglo-Americans in the Midwest. It is an epic that places Ms
Agee among
the likes of Louise Erdrich as our best chroniclers of the region. — Greg Sarris
The Weight of Dreams is a book you'll want to sink into, its vast and rich landscapes,
its broken
and hopeful characters, its broad reach through time and space, and every hidden corner
of the human
heart. Jonis Agee tells this story with consonance and generosity, a finely tuned ear
and the spirit as
wild as a Sand Hills horse. — Pam Houston
Agee tells a good story ... emotionally satisfying. — Library Journal
Emotionally satisfying. — Booklist
Returning to the themes of her 1993 Strange Angels with a detour through the badlands of
Russell Banks,
Agee offers a rambling saga that includes an abuse-riddled Nebraska family, a hideous
crime, a slow path to
redemption, and the love of a good woman. ... Riveting scenes of ranch life and the
grimly glorious
Nebraska countryside. — Kirkus Reviews
Jonis Agee has written an intriguing tale that centers on a beautiful but severe
land. — Book Survey
Jonis Agee's acclaimed fiction has established her as a visceral, lyrical interpreter
of the interplay between
family legends and reality, the land and its inhabitants, the forces of
nature and those of the human heart. Her landscapes are primitive, her characters
intense and magnetic,
her themes mythic even as she "celebrates the gritty, scarred layers of the daily
world with specificity and
wisdom. — Chicago Tribune
Against the stunning backdrop of a vanishing West, The Weight of Dreams intertwines
the passion and
sweep of Larry McMurtry with a narrative of love and family as compelling as those
of Rosellen Brown
or Jane Hamilton. ... A novel of greed, power, and violence — from a "gifted
poet of that dark lushness
in the heart of the American landscape." — The New York Times Book Review
[We] believe in Agee's people, in their mixed motives and unresolved conflicts
and uncertain futures, just as we believe in the harsh and beautiful land they live
in. — Los Angeles Times
Deeply affecting. Agee's tale about loss and regeneration gathers majestic force with
each page. — The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
One of the best books of the year. — St Louis Post-Dispatch
A beautiful novel of the American plains and the secrets of the last frontier. ...
Haunts the reader long after the last
page is turned. — Baltimore Sun
Agee knows the darkest secret of the New West — the ever-present, distorting
power of
greed and New Money. ... After an un-cliched climax in a reservation courtroom,
the novel leaves readers with
a modest promise of redemption, in a vast landscape "where it seemed perfectly
reasonable to dream small,
ordinary lives that took up the land and gave it back at the end." The Weight of
Dreams is neither small nor
ordinary; it's a prairie wind blowing through the stuffy rooms of contemporary
literary fiction. — Minneapolis Star Tribune
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Taking the Wall
Copyright © 1999
by Jonis Agee
Coffee House Press
How to Buy
|
As the engines roar and the checkered flag waves, these stories tear across their rural
landscape with the energy
of a Winston Cup race. Like WP Kinsella's minor league ballplayers, Jonis Agee's drivers,
pit crews, mechanics,
and their families live in small towns, eat at truck stops, and have a hard time keeping
their dreams from destroying
their lives. From the garage to the kitchen table, from demolition derby to NASCAR, A
gee's hapless heroes open
our eyes as they take the wall.
The wildly popular sport of auto racing is a backdrop in these stories for
exploration of the creative and
destructive aspects of obsession. In farm houses, mobile homes, and roadside
trailer courts, fathers and
sons, mothers and daughters all try to figure out how to keep their families
running as smoothly as their
cars. Taking the Wall
is rich with details about racing and rural life, and richer yet in insight into
that part of the human spirit that just
doesn't know how to quit. Agee takes a personal and compassionate look at the
grab bag of individuals linked
together by the obsession that makes them a
community. — from the jacket
From the first lap to the checkered flag, Taking the Wall is a great ride.
— Jimmy Vasser, 1996 CART Champion
Tender strains of compassion run through these stories of people who live on
the edge of a world of compression
ratios, jack men and pit stops. ... Taking the Wall is a beautifully written
book, filled with grace and wit, a book
that will leave you with the comforting
feeling that the author not only knows but cares about the characters she has
created. Jonis Agee takes us beyond
the fierce world of the race tracks where people pay for their mistakes and
into the quieter world of their domestic
lives where they face their humble longings and disappointments. —
Jim Heynen, author of The One Room Schoolhouse
Agee's collection of bittersweet stories dissects the rough world of auto
racing from the working-class
perspectives of drivers, pit crews, fans, family and other hangers-on.
While "taking the wall" — crashing
into it — is the worst possible scenario, Agee's characters secretly
wish for the excitement, horror, and
suspense it offers: will the driver walk away from the fiery wreck? ... Agee's
parsimonious language is
stamped with a stark, forceful clarity. This is a stellar collection about
blue-color folk, their plucky and
despairing relationships and their dreams of speed and glamour. ... If this
book were a movie, it would
be a noisy midwestern starring Steve McQueen, Jack Nicholson, and Sissy
Spacek, with Martha Plimpton
as the feisty young grease monkey working at the Glory to God garage,
across from the Curl Up & Dye
Hair Salon. — Publishers Weekly
Car racing is somewhere below wrestling and fishing for me, but I was very,
very moved by these stories
about race car families and hteir aspirations and heartbreaks. This is
universal stuff, and any writer who can
compare motor oil to honey deserves our attention. — Carl Lennertz,
Book Sense 76, Bookselling This Week
You don't have to be a motorhead to relate to the characters in this new
collection from Agee. Though the
lives of the race-car drivers, mechanics, and pit crew workers depicted
here revolve around auto racing,
the stories are about their struggles with spouses, lovers, parents, and
children. — Library Journal
Stock-car races and demolition derbies are the settings for Agee's newest
collection of short stories, which
explores the lives of people who dream (usually futilely) of escaping their
small-town, small-time lives in the
American heartland and heading for bigger cities, brighter lights, and better
cars. — Booklist
Agee's absorbing new collection of short stories, Taking the Wall, is set in
the world of auto racing,
but it's really about those times in life when we have to switch gears. ...
Much of the power in Agee's short fiction lies in what's left unsaid. ... By
writing just enough and
nothing more, Agee forces us to imagine the rest. ... spare, muscular short
stories. — The New York Times
Jonis Agee's stories unfold with headlong energy. Almost all of Taking the Wall
relates to automobile
racing — demolition derbies, stock cars, swamp buggies, Winston Cup
challenges — Agee goes deep into
the language of this world, and her paragraphs dive and turn abruptly from
one to one to another, inside
and out the drivers' minds, even into
their resigned humor. — Ruminator Review
Jonis Agee knows a lot about people, and as much (or more) about forgiveness. ...
Agee makes us
believe in old-fashioned things: that love heals, blood is thicker than water, and
that you can’t put a
price on loyalty. — The St Paul Pioneer Press
Agee's characters are everyday people, achieving the sublime through prose as plain
as it is
evocative — the toughest kind to produce, as any honest scribe will tell
you. ... These tales, however,
are less about burning rubber and revving engines than the revolutions of the
human heart. — Minneapolis Star Tribune
The danger of "taking the wall" is an undercurrent that runs through these stories,
from
the driver in "Over the Point of Cohesion," who obsessively studies the printouts
of his pit crew trying
to figure out what he did wrong to have the wreck that ended his career, to the
mother in "Caution,"
grievously reliving the last time she saw her race car driver daughter. —
Denver Post
Consistent with that unheroic view of the sport, Taking the Wall is a book about
the races that aren't won,
the cars that quit running, and, as the title implies, the moments when a driver
crashes and bursts into flames. — City Pages
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Strange Angels
Copyright © 1999
by Jonis Agee
Penguin
How to Buy
|
Jonis Agee's previous novel, Sweet Eyes, was
named a New York
Times Notable Book and was praised as "an extraordinary
first novel." In her
new novel, Strange Angels, Agee has created a deeply
moving tale that
evokes the Nebraska sandhills and the contemporary West,
and explores the
power of familial and cultural myths.
The sandhills have always loomed large in Agee's imagination
as a
place where people "can't escape the natural world, where there is an ongoing discourse
with the elements that
forces living things in conjunction, stripping them to their essential natures."
In this setting, the three children of Heywood Bennett, recently deceased rancher
and freethinker, do battle with
each other and the power of their father, who continues to exert control over them,
even from the grave. Arthur,
outraged at being denied his place as the family's sole legitimate heir, tries to
destroy his bastard brother, Cody.
Kya, the free-spirited sister both brothers adore, searches for her mother and her
Lakota heritage on South Dakota's
Rosebud Reservation. And Cody, who has cowboyed on the ranch
since the age of fourteen, falls in love with Latta Jaboy, the older widow next door.
Early in the nineteenth century, the Nebraska sandhills were referred to as the
Great American Desert — and avoided.
By the late 1880s, ranchers discovered that the grass-covered hills and plentiful
waters were perfect for raising
cattle. Yet the region has remained relatively sheltered from the extreme cultural
and technological shifts of the late
twentieth century — satellite dishes, for example, only recently brought
television to the sandhills.
Agee captures this somewhat isolated world filled with cowboys, cattle, small
towns, Indian reservations, and huge
stretches of rolling prairie. Strange Angels
is at once a beautifully written
family saga, a powerful love story, and a
mesmerizing evocation of the contemporary West. With this her second novel,
Jonis Agee confirms once again that
she is, as the New York Times Book Review has described her, "a gifted
poet of that dark lushness in the heart of the American landscape." — from the jacket
Agee has written a beautiful, rough novel that her characters inhabit so persuasively
we become their kin. — Frederick Busch
Because Agee succeeds so well in bringing this countryside to life, at first glance
Strange Angels seems a realistic work.
One soon comes to realize, however, that despite some remarkable descriptions —
including a cattle branding, a slum in a
Lakota Sioux reservation, a rodeo — one is not in the realm of realism at all.
Instead, the novel is better understood as a
romantic fable of the Old West that at once reveals and mythologizes the dark depths
of human nature and experience,
a tale presided over by ghosts, where the
protagonists are all outlaws of one kind or another. ... The novel's power and
significance reside in Agee's ability to connect
to and enlarge upon the myth of the Wild West. She vividly portrays cowboy life
in all of its degradation, violence and
romance. — Chicago
Tribune
Inspired ... A rollicking love song to a dying breed. — Kansas City Star
With Strange Angels, Agee spins a captivating web of the rugged West, stormy romance
and struggling
siblings. — Orlando Sentinel
Jonis Agee engages in conversation with the verve of a racquetball player who focuses
on continuing the rally.
Yet she punctuates talk with laughter, relishing moments when she drops something off
the wall. Her writing has
this intensity too. Agee conveys tangled relationships at a canter that carries readers
along, yet they still see the
flowers, the particulars of her beloved Midwest. — St Paul Pioneer Press
"My family comes from Nebraska, and I can tell you one thing: they don't talk about
anything personal. My mother's
favorite saying was 'If you can't say something nice about someone, don't say
anything at all.' Nebraskans talk about
taxes, beef, corn and the weather, and almost nothing else. Why this should be
I cannot say, but I think it is the
landscape. Here, the material world dominates. The sky crowds out everything else.
Perhaps to know the secret of the Great Plains is to lack the will to say it out
loud." This is what is so refreshing about
Jonis Agee's Strange Angels, a novel as emotional as an improvisation in a New York
City acting class. Here is a
Nebraska where people say everything there is to say, and more. ... Ms Agee's
description of a working ranch is
stunningly authentic. She deserves great praise for her use of ordinary language.
Her prose is economical, tasteful,
precise. Ms Agee is also a poet, and it shows. She
knows the real beauty of these lives. — William Hauptman,
New York Times Book Review
Jonis Agee's new novel, brawling and turbulent with the passions of contemporary
cowboys and cowgirls, will add luster to an already shining literary reputation. ...
Agee has written a book that is a
celebration of our mortal progress from self-love to a love of all that is other.
— Kelly Cherry, Minneapolis Star Tribune
A big, rowdy ... western ranch saga about three Nebraskan siblings of mixed ancestry
who battle it out with each
other when the patriarch dies. ... After Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres, yet
another western twist on Lear seems
ill-advised, but Agee peoples a lived-in landscape with wild, vivid people. —
Kirkus Reviews
Highly detailed characterization combined with a strong regional sense of place for
ranch and small-town life are this
lengthy novel's strongest points, while Native American lore (Kya's mother was Lakota
Sioux) adds a certain
texture. — Library Journal
Although Strange Angels is primarily an exploration of individual character,
the drama
is played against a stunning backdrop of the Nebraska sandhills, a wild, lonely and
still largely unknown part of
America, perhaps the last vestige of a still unmythologized West.
This is harsh, unglamorous country, isolated and dangerous. Ranch work is grinding,
filthy and unrelenting;
rodeos are brutal, and drunkenness often offers the only possible solace and escape.
The author is
unflinching and graphic in her description of the realities that have formed and
shaped her characters.
[A] powerful novel. ... In creating a world seldom encountered in contemporary
fiction, Agee has virtually
reinvented the Western novel. — Los Angeles Times Book Review
It's a love story, a passionate account of a liaison between two very tough people. ... The
author is master of the magic that can inhabit small moments ... The family battle set in
an isolated land at times gives
the novel an epic cast that can seem at odds with modern sensibility. Ours is not an epic
age. But Strange Angels remains a compelling read
throughout. — Albuquerque Journal
Strange Angels is, above all, an ode to a rural way of life. To the book's men
and women, the needs of livestock
and chores always take precedence over the needs of individuals. —
Omaha World-Herald
Strange Angels is a marvelous read, a deft job of workmanship and a vivid —
if sometimes relentless — depiction of
wounded souls. ... This is a brave, sometimes frightening novel, full of honesty and
hope. — St Paul Pioneer Press
Strange Angels, redolent of saddle leather and Nebraska grit, proves again how
Jonis Agee is crazy in love with
her characters' world-battered bodies and ground-shaking dreams. She has written a
beautiful, tough novel that
they inhabit so persuasively we become their kin. — Frederick Busch
In country that is as rugged and unforgiving as the human heart, Jonis Agee transports
her readers into the West
we all came west to find. Here the women are barely greenbroke, the men handsome
charismatic cheats; even the
ghosts compel us to listen hard to their too-late wisdom. Both visceral and lyrical,
Strange Angels will leave
readers just as
I was: tapping my fingers anxiously for the next Agee novel. — Jo-Ann Mapson
Strange Angels is both Cody Kidwell's initiation into mature love and
Jonis Agee's tribute to a tough and
vanishing West. A risky and breathtaking novel. — Robley Wilson
An ardent and large-hearted tale of unruly affections in tough country. —
Deirdre McNamer
Agee writes knowingly of ranching life, the Indian nations and the modern
realities of reservations. ... She
brings a heartfelt lyricism to her evocation of the vanishing West. —
Publishers Weekly
Agee has achieved a rare balance here between grit — horse thievery, knock
down fistfights, rodeos, and
blizzards — and breathtaking lyricism, sensuality and catharsis. —
Booklist (starred review)
When the powerful patriarch of a Nebraska ranching family dies, his three sons
discover he has left each
of them an equal share of his ranch. As they struggle with a common bond to their
larger-than-life father,
their jealousy and mistrust threaten to destroy them all. — Amazon.com
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South of Resurrection
Copyright © 1997
by Jonis Agee
Penguin
How to Buy
|
When Moline Bedwell fled the small town of Resurrection, MO,
at the age of sixteen,
she vowed she would never come back. Now, twenty years later,
having lost her
family, she returns for what she thinks is a two-week trip to
sell her parents' home.
But Moline soon becomes embroiled in the fight to save her Aunt
Walker and Uncle
Able's farm from the clutches of the Heart Hog Corporation and
finds herself falling
in love again with Dayrell Bell — the wild hillbilly boy she
abandoned to an unjust jail
term when she escaped her hometown all those years ago. Secrets,
danger, and
the ghosts of the past converge to draw her into battles of
progress and tradition,
race and class, and her own ambivalence toward a new life that
must be rooted in
the old. In South of Resurrection, Agee's superb prose and gritty
characters
tell a compelling and passionate story of going home again and
learning
that — maybe — you never need have left. — from the
jacket
In the generous scope of a novel, readers can enter a landscape, a
tradition,
a history, and the lives of people they are glad to know. It is a pleasure
and a revelation to read a novel as resonant and unaffected as South of
Resurrection. — Sandra Scofield
You can go home again, the heroine of Agee's earthy, deeply satisfying
latest discovers — you just
can't expect home to be easy, or life there particularly simple. Agee
(Strange Angels, 1993, etc.)
has always demonstrated a distinctive skill for creating complex,
tough-minded, open-hearted
women. ... Agee gently peels away the many
layers of history that accumulate when a family has lived in one place
for a very long time.
There's a pleasing and believable succession of secrets revealed. And
Moline and Dayrell's wary
courtship is among the most brambly, and original, in recent fiction.
One of the best novels by
anyone writing today about the old, long-settled corner of the South.
— Kirkus Reviews
It's an achy-breaky narrative, heavy on the pedal steel guitar, about a
woman who returns to her hometown after 23 years and, among other things,
falls in love with a beery old redneck named Dayrell. ... Agee's sentences
have an easy swing to them, and she has an eye for funky detail. —
New York Times Book Review
Some novelists build their stories around plot, others around characters.
Jonis Agee builds her novels upon the small but luminous details. In her
new novel, South of Resurrection,
Agee finds these details in the landscape
and history of the Missouri Ozarks. She names the plants and birds, the
snakes, the very rocks that line the streambeds. She knows the way
streams flood and what the floods do to roads, houses, and cemeteries.
She knows the patterns of the weather
and what they can do to the people who live there. She
knows the way boots are made.
Her characters rise up out of these details,
out of their intimate relationship to the place they live.
This is a book where people seem to live
toward their fates, and we follow their progression with
an almost tragic sense of inevitability. — Ann Arbor Observer
Jonis Agee has written an
intriguing tale that centers on a beautiful but severe land. — Manatee
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A .38 Special and a Broken Heart
Copyright © 1995
by Jonis Agee
Coffee House Press
How to Buy
|
Honest, biting, and bittersweet, A .38 Special and a Broken Heart
is a rich collection of
stories by critically acclaimed author Jonis Agee. Packed with emotional
detail and
compelling narrative force, these stories are about people who love,
lose, and try again.
Persistence and strength, betrayal and forgiveness, weakness and
acceptance, mercy
and mystery, life and death — all find themselves played out in this
collection. — from the jacket
This new volume in the Coffee-to-Go Short-Short Story series explores
the tangled intersections of love and death. Most of the 29 selections are
"momentary stories" that "fling themselves at you and you don't have any
choice but catch them." ... Most of her tales are from the perspective
of the wronged woman, but in "Listen" she anticipates and rebuts the
objections of a pompous male critic. "I told him that you have to be
careful when you break horses that you don't break their spirit too."
This spirit resounds in the splendid economy of Agee's deft
characterization and sharp, visceral imagery. — Publishers
Weekly
This latest volume in the publisher's "Coffee to Go" series reveals
almost thirty selections of short
stories which have minimal plots and strong impacts.
Agee's special style provides a strong and
unique set of circumstances spiced with memorable observations
of human nature. — Midwest Book Review
Sexual disconnections play a part in many of the stories in
Jonis Agee's
wonderful new collection A .38 Special and a Broken Heart,
but Agee turns them
into a kind of wry, rueful comedy. The women in Agee's stories,
mostly
middle-aged and marinating in the funk of broken relationships,
stare out at the
world through bloodshot eyes and deliver acutely observed
descriptions of their bad
nerves and bad dreams.
Agee's women are down but not out. "She'd been a Cadillac
kind of girl for a while,
then she was just any kind of girl," Agee writes in a sad and
lovely five-paragraph
story titled "There Has to Be a Beginning." "She'd go here
and there in the cars
they drove because walking was something she only did
before she learned to get in
with the boys who leaned out of windows and called to her."
The woman's sharp
memories offer an odd form of hope: "She just wanted to
disappear into the good
light nerve her flesh turned when a boy got satin smooth and
begging hands, and
she never had to say no if they never asked."
Agee's stories brim with tragicomic moments: one pregnant
woman, upon hearing
the news of Kennedy's assassination, tries to "get upset
enough to miscarry";
another woman worries because her therapist has a "signed
picture of Frank Zappa
and the Mothers of Invention" hanging on her office wall;
yet another blunders
while trying to commit suicide and moans, "Now I've
embarrassed myself to
myself. I'm so ridiculous, even death won't have me." — Hungry Mind Review
A .38 Special and a Broken Heart is short-short story writing at its
best. It deserves to be read, read again and passed to every story-loving
friend on down the road. — Albuquerque Journal
Jonis Agee is in my estimation a fearless writer and this a
startling collection with staying power. These stories will
stick with you. — Amelia Franz
This short-short
story collection contains more than two dozen brief tales,
most set in the rural plains landscape familiar from her other
fiction and in the lonely hearts of characters more experienced in
dealing with failure and loss than with joy and success. Death figures in
Agee's tales, but so does forgiveness; despair and the burden of family
share these
wide open spaces with fragile hope and moments of kindness. Agee's fans
— and readers who
appreciate the immmediacy of good short-shorts — will find much to
relish here. — Booklist
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Stiller's Pond
Copyright © 1991
Jonis Agee, Robert Blakley,
and Susan Welch, editors
New Rivers Press
How to Buy
|
This book is an enlarged second edition of
a collection that was heralded as both "ambitious" and
"flavorful" when it originally appeared in 1988.
Many of the writers anthologized — including Jon
Hassler, Carol Bly, Kathleen Norris, Diane Glancy, and Will Weaver —
will
be well-known to readers.
Stiller's Pond is a celebration of the Upper Midwest. —
from the jacket
If you want a book that allows
you to sample the varied voices talking, singing,
complaining, remembering, enduring, and loving in this heartland,
you'll want to read the
new Stiller's Pond. — St Paul Pioneer Press Dispatch
|
Bend This Heart
Copyright © 1989
by Jonis Agee
Coffee House Press
How to Buy
|
These very short stories have, at best, the compressed energy and the
intensity of good poetry. — Alice Adams
The stories in Bend This Heart are like fresh potato chips. You
can't eat just one. The more you eat, the more you want. A delicious
mind at work. — Diane Wakoski
Abrupt, restless, and memorable, Jonis Agee's stories have a
straightforward honesty about love, sex, and obsession, and the structures
we evoke to contain them. They have the texture of a sleepless night in
which we are hooked to the bone by everything we have desired. In story
after story, the mask drops away from gentility, and we come face to face
with the truth. These stories are beautiful because of their courage:
there is nothing they are afraid to say. — Charles Baxter
In this volume you'll find stories sharp enough to cut your fingers on.
Some of the best are short. You can read them in five minutes, but they
will stay with you all day. Agee has a clear and unsentimental eye for our
cruelties, our wishes, our attempts to love and our attempts to be free.
She is a remarkable craftsman of short stories that combine speed with
substance. — Marge Piercy
The title of Jonis Agee's new collection of short
stories, Bend This Heart, is instructive, an invitation to make
someone feel,
not to break a heart but to bend it — to change its shape,
to turn it in a different direction, to subdue it — to make a heart
work.
These are 23 love stories, though the phrase needs qualification.
They are the
clear-eyed reports of someone who sees things as they are, not as she
would wish them
to be. ... Keenly alive with language, [making] both the heart and
the mind work. — Amy Hempel, New York Times Book Review
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Pretend We've Never Met
Copyright © 1989
by Jonis Agee
Coffee House Press
How to Buy
|
In Pretend We've Never Met, her 1989 collection of short narrative
sketches, Jonis Agee drew with a strong, spare lyricism a portrait of a
rural Midwestern landscape she called Divinity, Iowa. — New York
Times Book Review
Her stories take risks and a rewarding number succeed. — Perry
Glasser, North American Review
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Border Crossings
Copyright © 1984
Jonis Agee, Roger Blakley,
Johnm Rezmerski, Janet Shaw,
and CW Truesdale, editors
New Rivers Press
How to Buy
|
A collection of some of the best individual pieces submitted to the
annual Minnesota Voices Project — 20 Midwestern women writers are
represented here. Ideal for those interested in the Midwest or
for classroom use. — from the jacket
Border Crossings confines itself to regional writing, with the result
that it delivers a
strong sense of place and of history ...
Martha Roth's "A Waitress Journal,"
for example,
takes the reader behind the scenes at The Minnesota Room, an ordinary little
restaurant ... Jane O'Connell Nowak's "An Orphan in the Family,"
is an account of a
poor, fat girl's summer at a rich girl's camp — from
weeks of solitude and humiliation
to her final, absolutely plausible triumph. — Gargoyle
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|
Houses
Copyright © 1976
by Jonis Agee
Truck Press
How to Buy |
Jonis Agee began her writing life as a poet. Her first volume of
poetry, Houses,
is a narrative exploring her family history, a group that
includes the explorer Meriwether Lewis and the outlaw Jesse James, as
well as the less well-known but no less colorful William Tecumseh
Sherman Agee, a prosecuting attorney in Verseilles, Missouri, and a
Reverend Willson, who was seriously injured while trying to cross a
river to reach one of his parishoners. Houses established her as a
writer whose territory is the interplay between family legends and
reality, the land and its inhabitants, the forces of nature and those of
the human heart.
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