Description
Fiction. In a preface to this volume, Merrill Gilfillan reflects, "Most of these stories took shape during the latter twentieth century, a period when I was regularly exploring the topography of the American Great Plains (especially the 'Indian country' of Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas) and beginning, with hesitant steps, to engage that landscape as the rich, if airy, theater for human action and culture that it is and has been for a humbling number of centuries. Having made a certain peace-of-understanding with the vast reaches of the domain, I slowly sensed that the landscape itself, the high, honeycombed visibility of the grasslands, was rendering, offering up at its own sweet pace, the human tales—above all, those of the deep-rooted native peoples—afoot within its wind-cut spaces."
"Each character is given the same quiet respect the writer gives to nature. They rise out of the land, share its timelessness...No other author today writes such thoughtful, lyrical, and majestic prose."—Lucia Berlin
"If anyone writes better prose in America I am unaware of it."—Jim Harrison
"Some of the purest, most concentrated 'fiction' in American prose literature. Astonishing."—Booklist
"His poet's language is carved and dangerous...his view is a long, clear one, heartening to find in print."—New York Times
Author Bio
Merrill Gilfillan was born in Mount Gilead, Ohio, in 1945 and studied literature at the Universities of Michigan and Iowa. His first book of poems appeared in 1970. OLD RIVER, NEW RIVER: A MISCELLANY (Red Dragonfly Press, 2019) is his latest book. Recent publications from Flood Editions include RED MAVIS, UNDANCEABLE, SELECTED POEMS 1965-2000, THE BARK OF THE DOG, Harpsichord Hills (Horse Less Press), and TALK ACROSS WATER: STORIES SELECTED AND NEW, as well as a collection of alfresco essays, THE WARBLER ROAD. A collection of his SELECTED AND NEW STORIES will appear in 2019 from Flood Editions. A sheaf of landscape drawings called Distant Rivers appeared in 2012. He lives in Colorado.
Author City: DENVER, CO USA