Description

New from award-winning Michigan writer Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage is rich with local color and peopled with rural characters who love and hate extravagantly. They know how to fix cars and washing machines, how to shoot and clean game, and how to cook up methamphetamine, but they have not figured out how to prosper in the twenty-first century. Through the complex inner lives of working-class characters, Campbell illustrates the desperation of post-industrial America, where wildlife, jobs, and whole ways of life go extinct and the people have no choice but to live off what is left behind.

The harsh Michigan winter is the backdrop for many of the tales, which are at turns sad, brutal, and oddly funny. One man prepares for the end of the world—scheduled for midnight December 31, 1999—in a pole barn with chickens and survival manuals. An excruciating burn causes a man to transcend his racist and sexist worldview. Another must decide what to do about his meth-addicted wife, who is shooting up on the other side of the bathroom door. A teenaged sharpshooter must devise a revenge that will make her feel whole again. Though her characters are vulnerable, confused, and sometimes angry, they are also resolute. Campbell follows them as they rebuild their lives, continue to hope and dream, and love in the face of loneliness.

Fellow Michiganders, fans of short fiction, and general readers will enjoy this poignant and affecting collection of tales.

Author(s)

Bonnie Jo Campbell is the author of a collection of stories, Women & Other Animals, and a novel, Q Road. She is the winner of a Pushcart prize, the AWP Award for Short Fiction, and Southern Review’s 2008 Eudora Welty Prize for “The Inventor, 1972,” which is included in this collection. Her work has appeared in Southern Review, Kenyon Review, and Ontario Review.

Reviews

“Her writing is raw, precise and unflinching, breaking down our picture of the human condition and throwing it back onto the scattered pile of puzzle pieces that best represent it. . . . As brutal as the details are, Campbell’s tales feel like prayers that float upward, those for the poor, the addicted, the lost, and the forgotten. Stunning stuff.”

— METROTIMES

“In these stories about cold, lonely, meth-drenched, working-class Michigan life, there’s a certain beauty reaching something like the sublimity of a D.H. Lawrence story. Few of the stories have endings that seem resolved. Because of their despairing feel, and their shape and form, they seem quite lifelike.”

— Chicago Tribune

"The houses are ramshackle, the trucks old, the weather extreme. The men, clad in shabby camouflage, are battered and scarred. They labor at dangerous, soul-killing jobs; hunt; drink too much; and stand by their women no matter how flat-out crazy they are (or they think about killing them). The women do the same. Money is tight; the old ways and the precious wildlife are disappearing; loneliness is a plague; and the meth-cookers keep burning down the house. Welcome to rural Michigan, Campbell’s home ground, and a story collection of rare impact. These fine-tuned stories are shaped by stealthy wit, stunning turns of events, and breath-taking insights."

— Booklist

“In these stories about cold, lonely, meth-drenched, working-class Michigan life, there’s a certain beauty in reaching something like the sublimity of D.H. Lawrence story.  Few of the stories have endings that seem resolved.  Because of their despairing feel, and their shape and form, they seem quite lifelike.”

— Chicago Tribune

“The effects of American Salvage, with just with into its third printing and has only been out three months, is that Campbell’s Michigan lingers and cannot be ignored or forgotten.”

— Chicago Literary Scene Examiner

“Campbell’s an American voice – two parts healthy fear, one part awe, one part irony, one part realism.”

— Los Angeles Times

“These fine-tuned stories are shaped by stealthy wit, stunning turns of events, and breath-taking insights.  Campbell’s busted-broke, damaged, and discarded people are rich in longing, valor, forgiveness and love, and readers themselves will feel salvaged and transformed by the gutsy book’s fierce compassion.”

— Booklist

“’Beware ye who enter here,’ and yet your should and must because the work is so fine and truthful and deeply human,  And you will surely know yourself and your world better for having come.”

— Small Press Review

“ American Salvage is not a book for the cowardly. These daring stories, these desperate characters, would just as soon steal your wallet, break your heart or punch you in the gut than openly admit that redemption is possible during these dark times. But it is just this improbable hope that makes her work brilliant. This is Bonnie Jo Campbell at her bravest and best.”

— Rachael Perry, author of How to Fly

“Most authors imitate life, while only a few create life. Bonnie Jo Campbell creates 'em then lets her create-lings live according to their own wills.”

— Carolyn Chute, author of The School on Hearts Content Road

“A strong collection. The pieces are rich in original detail, and highly atmospheric, while maintaining a satisfying sense of familiar territory, local voices.”

— Laura Kasischke, author of The Life before Her Eyes and Lilies Without

“At their best these stories reflect what Robert Lowell refers to as ‘the grace of accuracy,’ which might simply be a way of saying that the voice overall convinces at every turn. By voice I mean personality, and these quirky, surprising, sometimes arcane and visceral and big-hearted stories resonate in ways that keep me nodding. . . . I love the risk of each story and how, in the midst of hilarity, a much more serious concern unfolds so that I’d find myself both laughing out loud and squeezing my heart dry simultaneously.”

— Jack Driscoll, author of How Like an Angel

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• Press release
• Booklist review
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• Reader's guide
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