Nocturnal America

by John Keeble

Eastern Washington author John Keeble, a veteran writer of the modern West, links the nine stories in this Prairie Schooner Book Prize–winning collection through recurring characters; names appear in one story's background and become central to the next.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press (November 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0803227779

Book Description

Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, this collection of loosely connected tales returns readers to the American Northwest so finely observed and powerfully evoked in John Keeble’s previous, celebrated works. Nocturnal America occupies a terrain at once familiar and strange, where homecoming and dislocation can coincide, and families can break apart or hone themselves on the hard edges of daily life. In these stories, Keeble populates what journalist Joel Garreau once called the “Empty Quarter” of North America with complex humanity. Life ranges vibrantly through these airy spaces, at times finding itself thrown up against the shifty terrors of political change and the antic scrim of culture.

Keeble’s stories hinge on love—its difficulty, its loss and pangs, but also its discovery of good fortune and even illumination in steadiness through travail. As his characters come and go, unexpectedly converging, vanishing, or reappearing, their stories reach beyond the ordinariness of life and the particularities of place to create something akin to community.

About the Author

John Keeble is the author of Out of the Channel: The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill in Prince William Sound and four novels, including Broken Ground and Yellowfish. His short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in the Village Voice, American Short Fiction, Outside, and Best American Short Stories. Keeble is also the writer for the prize-winning PBS documentary on the life of Raymond Carver, To Write and Keep Kind. He has held a Guggenheim Fellowship and received a Washington State Governor’s Award.