Fiction. Winner of the AWP Prize for the Novel, judged by Jim Shepard. Follow four friends as they move from The Brady Bunch to Seinfeld, from junior high to middle management. There is Quint, whose rebellion frays into self-destruction; Slow, who struggles to become the world's first teenage father figure; Chimes, who fears losing his friends while picking up a 7-10 split; and Barb who escapes the conformity of Minnisapa only to find herself returning by dark of night. You will feel as if you've always lived in Minnisapa, Minnesota. And you will never underestimate nice kids from the Midwest again. "MERIT BADGES is hilarious, painful, lovely, nostalgic, generous and true. Kevin Fenton creates an unforgettable group of characters, in whose lives and thoughts and actions readers will often recognize themselves. This is a very funny, very moving, and wonderful book"—Julie Schumacher.
Author City: SAINT PAUL, MN USA
Kevin Fenton lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and works as an advertising writer and creative director. His fiction has appeared in the Northwest Review, the Laurel Review, and the Emprise Review. His writing on graphic design has been anthologized in Looking Closer 2: Critical Writing On Graphic Design and Émigré No. 70: The Look Back Issue. He holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Minnesota and a J.D. from the University of Minnesota Law School.
Reviews and Other Links
author blog
Publishers Weekly
Emily Carter @ the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune
interview by Jodi Chromey @ Minnesota Reads
Catherine Rihm @ Des Moines Cityview
Frances Edstrom @ Winona Post
Katy Read @ University of Minnesota Alumni magazine
“MERIT BADGES lays out for the reader an entire, if circumscribed, world, in all of its limitations and surprising possibilities, rendered with a heartening intelligence and tenderness and wit—‘The weather was like me, only more so. The weather needed some counseling’—and in so doing reminds us of Simone Weil’s understanding that attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
—Jim Shepard, from his judge’s comments
“MERIT BADGES is hilarious, painful, lovely, nostalgic, generous and true.”
Julie Schumacher
“Kevin Fenton’s Minnisapa is a place to rival any in fiction, so skillfully sculpted that you put down the book (reluctantly, when you must) sure you’ve lived there your entire life.”
Amy Shearn
“In MERIT BADGES, Kevin Fenton welcomes his lucky readers to Minnisapa, Minnesota on the Mississippi banks where, amidst the confusions of the last quarter of the 20th Century, the hills knelt like buffaloes, public niceness was an art form, and the winter air was a psychopath. Here is literary art working, without flaw, at the highest level of affirmation and intelligence.”
Tom McBride