Mending: New and Selected Stories / by Sallie Bingham

Although a middle-aged woman's life is consumed by doctor's appointments which do little more than offer emotional reassurance, it's the only way she can receive intimacy, and, in effect, the only way to "mend" her damaged soul. Two sisters, the eldest one which escaped the downtrodden family farm years ago and the younger one that didn't, talk about what's to be done with it now that their mother's succumbed to cancer. Ignoring her younger sister Shirley's emotional bond to the plot of land which she's been a part of all her life, the elder Miriam spares no tact in talking up her intentions of selling it all to the realtors, even envisioning her plan for the perfect cottage community. On another dying family farm, a capricious widow, still grieving the loss of her teenage daughter as well as her husband, hires a family of Haitian refugees against the will of her semi-bigoted land manager. Amid obvious discomfiture and through nearly impregnable language and cultural barriers, the more subtle admonitions of each's feelings about the other steadily bridge the communication gap, ultimately augmenting the perpetually tenuous social situation and initiating a serendipitous kind of connection.

Born and raised on a farm in Kentucky, literature professor, author, poet and playwright Sallie Bingham has spent much of her life in New York City, amid frequent trips to New Mexico, and has been married three times. Her stories have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly and Southwest Review and been featured in several anthologies and collections like this one which includes 5 new stories as well as sampling of her earlier work. Perhaps classified as a mildly feminist author with a realistic voice similar to Joyce Carol Oates or Margaret Atwood, Bingham also has something of Chekhov in her prose, a steady, astute in-the-moment type of voice, economically deconstructing the scene in any given situation and presenting a masterfully dissected arrangement of people and feelings. With striking swiftness, the reader gets to know the principal characters--who they are, where they've been and (to some degree) what they'll do next--in a manner that's at once abrupt and palpable. It's a fun experience, worthy of its praise. (FIC BINGHAM)

The Landed: A Novel / by Tim Pears

The most memorable moments of Owen Ithell's childhood were spent on his grandparents farm in the Anglo-Welsh borderlands. Usually only there during holidays when he could accompany his grandfather, a hardscrabble farmer, on his chore rounds, Owen first cultivated his love of the soil. Most of his other memories of youth, of living at home with a cranky single mother and a disappointing academic record in school, aren't as nostalgic. Now an adult living in another, more urban part of England, he makes his living working as a gardener. He has a wife now, Mel, and three small children and believes he has found something resembling happiness.

When a fatal car accident takes the life of his young daughter and injures Owen, his hand  ultimately needing to be amputated, he falls into despair to the point of alienation from his family. Eventually Owen is legally separated from his wife estranged from his remaining children. Resolving to reconnect with a time and a place he once cherished, Owen makes a drastic decision, suddenly abducting his children and embarking on a walking journey to the Welsh farm of his childhood where he hopes to attain some kind of understanding and resolution. This is a rather riveting little novel. Pears has a somewhat unorthodox writing style. A bit of an abrupt, blunt method of storytelling akin to Don Delillo or Don Robertson, the author tells a story about the frequently hardluck circumstances encountered by those in England's west country. Thomas Hardy would be proud. (FIC PEARS)

My Antonia by Willa Cather

“My Antonia” is one of Willa Cather’s best known books. She began writing in her 40’s and this book is her fourth, first published in 1918. Cather is famous for giving us full and vivid stories of characters who explored and settled America, many of whom came from other countries. “My Antonia” is set in Nebraska, where Cather’s family relocated from Virginia when she was nine years old.

The book is about Antonia Shimerda, a Bohemian immigrant girl who first comes to Nebraska from Europe when she is only 12. But Antonia does not tell the story, her neighbor Jim does. He comes to Black Hawk, Nebraska, to live with his grandparents after his parents die, the same time that Antonia and her family arrive. His family helps Antonia’s family out as they undergo hardships. Think of living in a cave, hollowed out in the sod, during your first winter before you can plant and build a house ! The Shirmedas have to do just that to get through the bitter winter, hanging on until springtime.

Having the story told from Jim’s point of view gives us a chance to know Antonia as if she was our friend and companion, too. We see her vitality and high spirits. She loves the farm and the countryside, and when she has to live in the city for an interlude, being anonymous, alone among so many, crushes her spirit. She wants to be where she knows “every stack and tree, and where all the ground is friendly.”

Their two lives inevitably grow apart, as Jim becomes educated and moves east, rising in the world of railways and big business. Antonia stays on and has her own struggles in the small town and its community. But their friendship stands fast, anchored when they were children, wandering over the prairie that is so lush in spring, and so stark in the summer heat and the winter blasts. Cather brings the land and its feelings right to you, just as she does with the people. There are echoes of Fitzgerald’s Gatsby here- how the future beckons us, yet leaves the strongest feelings in the past. Cather suggests that Antonia has taken the right road – that the land and each other, and being faithful to both, may be our best chance for contentment.

The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived The Great American Dust Bowl / by Timothy Egan

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How could a natural disaster be man-made? Yet the Great Dust Bowl of the 1930's was just that. For many in the great plains states, most notably Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas, the Dust Bowl was not just a difficulty, like the financial woes others faced because of the country's economic depression. It was a catastrophe of epic scale, akin to some sort of biblical plague, begetting wide-scale damage, destruction and death in over 100 million acres, much of it centered in the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles. Many of the mostly farmers and their families, lots of them recent immigrants, simply up and left in the wake of the "Black Blizzard" even with nowhere to go. More than a few, like the Joads of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, traveled west to California where life was little better (and in more than a few cases, worse), though at least the air was breathable.

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But for those who stayed behind, life was not unlike hell on earth. The 'earth' itself quite literally turned against the farmers who were more or less deceived into cultivating the less-accommodating soil of the region. Seduced originally into buying land not accustomed to growing greener, more arable crops, the settlers had to learn the truth the hard way. Following decades of errant farming, defective crop rotations and years of famine and drought, the ruined topsoil caught up in the wind until a mass of flurrying dust, like mountains, blurred everything in its wake, terminating all organic life and causing epic amounts of ecological and agricultural damage.

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Author Egan does a good job of illuminating this not necessarily neglected, but perhaps less-scrutinized niche of American history. When most people think of the Dust Bowl, they think of drought, of windstorms and of families traveling westward wearing worn, haggard clothes and looking downcast in despair. But few even consider the plight of those who stayed, a forgotten collection of doomed souls--entire families and communities--left without any protection, sustenance or adequate relief. Thrust into starvation or made deathly ill by the dust itself, through "dust pneumonia", the region and the people consumed by the disaster would never be the same. (978.032 EGAN)

Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd

Although it's safe to say he had as many critics as admirers, Thomas Hardy barely seemed to notice. Unlike Dickens who embraced his many fans with welcomed arms, even seeming to thrive under public scrutiny, Hardy's relationship with his readers can only be described as one of careless indifference bordering on contempt. When his 1895 novel Jude the Obscure, though received moderately well by critics, threw his reading public into a a fit of outrage over the book's morbid content and perceived immorality, Hardy quit fiction altogether, focusing instead on poetry and short form prose until his death in 1928. Far From the Madding Crowd is one of his earliest and best-loved novels, confronting head-on the themes of country manners, feminine virtue, male obsession and unrequited love.

"The only superiority in women that is tolerable to the rival sex is, as a rule, that of the unconscious kind; but a superiority which recognizes itself may sometimes please by suggesting possibilities of capture to the subordinated man." p. 37

In the secluded, pastoral English county of Wessex, Gabriel Oak is a young, hard working farmer whose life becomes indelibly altered when he meets the spry, comely Bathsheba Everdene, a milkmaid from a neighboring farm. Though Gabriel's pursuits and courtship are not unencouraged, his honest proposal of marriage is turned down by the girl who soon relocates to another part of the county. When they next meet some months later, things have changed considerably. A terrible accident has killed off Gabriel's entire flock, forced the sale of his farm and thrust him into a life as hired hand while Bathsheba is now a moderately wealthy landowner, inheriting an estate and a considerable plot of land upon her uncle's death. By chance, when Gabriel happens upon a fire at Bathsheba's farm and spearheads the effort to extinguish it, his efforts are applauded by the locals and he is made the bailiff and estate manager under the Bathsheba's supervision.

Bathsheba's rather unconventional situation--young, single beautiful woman acting as sole proprietor to a large country estate--has caught the ear and eye of more than a few people in neighboring villages and surrounding countryside, most notably the wealthy, distinguished William Boldwood and the dashing Sergeant Francis Troy. Both men's courtship and subsequent entanglement with the immature, capricous Bathsheba are met with staggeringly ill consequences as the young woman's pride and stubborn wilfulness, Boldwood's covetous obsession, Troy's bigamy and hidden secrets culminate in each's bitter self-knowledge, agony and disgrace. It is only Gabriel's solemn, dutiful prudence and discretion which prevents Bathsheba herself from total ruin.

Written in 1874, Far from the Madding Crowd was Hardy's 1st Wessex novel and offers, in ample measure, the details of English country life the author so cherished. Chiefly featured, however, is Hardy's strict devotion to the tenets of realism, his portrayal of man's bitterly brutal lot echoing his deepest convictions as fallible human nature and moral ineptitude form the book's central themes. The price of vanity, unforeseen consequences and a taste for the tragic are on full display: all four or five principle characters endure harsh circumstances--not always unjustifiably--and are invariably certain to suffer from their actions. Incidents such as the young Fanny Robin's pregnancy with Troy's bastard child (and death as a result of), Boldwood's murderous rampage, Bathsheba's humiliating abasement, and Gabriel's quiet longing foreshadow events in Hardy's later novels in which protagonists like Tess d'Urbeville and Jude Fawley are mercilessly plagued by relentless misfortune. In 'Madding Crowd' the fates still favour some semblance of grace and mercy though as the two primary lead characters, Gabriel and Bathsheba, are able to escape affliction, learn from their mistakes, and ultimately find love with each other. But as with all of Hardy's Victorian novels the real draw is the author's master hand at eliciting mood, setting and characterization, his skill, intuition and metaphorical dexterity a wonder to behold. (FIC HARDY)