Nona Caspers' Little Book of Days accretes like a pearl, layer upon layer, around her evocation of experience through language. The perfect beauty of her record of daily living will call out to you, and make you want to write back, to cohabit the form she has so radiantly informed. Seize the day-Nona Caspers has, and transformed it into music.
Years after Caspers’s unnamed narrator loses her first lover in a tragic accident, she finds herself wondering, “What did she want from me? What are the things that matter?” In vivid, richly detailed vignettes, the book tracks the cyclical nature of grief and remembrance across a life fractured by loss. At times dryly comical, at other times radiantly surreal, The Fifth Woman is a testament to the resurrecting power of memory and enduring love.
Throughout this collection, which was plucked from a pile of 300 manuscripts and awarded the Grace Paley Prize in short fiction, Caspers details the many ways reality can interfere with our dreams. Not surprisingly, dissatisfaction becomes a dominant theme. . . . Many of Caspers's stories are set in Minnesota's cattle and dairy country, and all of them traffic in the kind of Midwestern realism that doesn't rely on pyrotechnics to generate dramatic heat. Throughout, Caspers's people--it's difficult to consider some of them mere characters--question the decisions they've made or the ones they refuse to make. There's nothing flashy about Caspers's prose; like the beauty of the prairie itself, its attraction lies in details seen up close.New York Times Book Review
From Baobab Press, in coordination with the University of Nevada, Reno’s Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program, comes This Side of the Divide: Stories, the first anthology in a literary series attempting to capture the newness, vastness, territoriality and sense of transience alive in the American West. Set west of the Continental Divide, these narratives skillfully demonstrate the beauty, austerity, and danger of the untouched wilderness, delight in the mutual ease and asphyxiation of the hyper-urban and chart the interstitial spaces of the developing and the abandoned. Inhabiting the West’s richly varied landscapes, the characters in these stories provide a glimpse of the social and cultural diversity on display in these regions. Among these 15 stories, gathered from rising literary voices, a single mother struggles to maintain her individuality while raising an autistic son; a cathartic hike brings an unsuspecting widow face-to-face with her own mortality; a man injured in a train wreck questions his existence as he blindly wanders the desert; an aging cowboy rides the highways astride his magnificent horse, a final remnant of a fleeting era; Sasquatch looks for love in all the wrong places; and a divorcee tries to reconcile her present with her past, her heart with her head. Positioning the voices of emerging authors alongside acclaimed writers such as Tobias Wolff, Brian Evenson and Nona Caspers, these collected stories, at turns hilarious, frightening, and devastating, showcase the variety of identity, amalgam of voice and depth of character that make the American West such a truly brilliant, literary mosaic. Contributors include Tobias Wolff, Maile Meloy, Brian Evenson, Melinda Moustakis, Nona Caspers, Douglas W. Milliken, David Gillette, Miranda Schmidt, Michelle Willms, Andrea Lani, Leah Griesmann, Vanessa Hua, Cathy Warner, Mark Maynard, Aharon Levy, Sian Griffiths, L.L. Madrid, Kirk Wilson, Ashley Davidson, Carl Beideman, E.G. Willy, Shelley Blanton-Stroud, and Linda Lenhoff.
