Bonnie Jo Campbell: Bonnie Jo Campbell

Bonnie Jo Campbell has created an unforgettable heroine in sixteen-year-old Margo Crane, a beauty whose unflinching gaze and uncanny ability with a rifle have not made her life any easier. After the violent death of her father, in which she is complicit, Margo takes to the Stark River in her boat, with only a few supplies and a biography of Annie Oakley, in search of her vanished mother. But the river, Margo's childhood paradise, is a dangerous place for a young woman traveling alone, and she must be strong to survive, using her knowledge of the natural world and her ability to look unsparingly into the hearts of those around her. Her river odyssey through rural Michigan becomes a defining journey, one that leads her beyond self-preservation and to the decision of what price she is willing to pay for her choices.

From the National Book Award finalist and author of Once Upon a River comes a dazzling story collection featuring ferocious mothers and scrappy daughters. The strong but flawed women of Mothers, Tell Your Daughters love and betray one another; their richly fraught relationships can act as anchors, lifelines, or deadly poison. Bonnie Jo Campbell's working-class protagonists are at once vulnerable, wise, cruel, and funny, and they are always getting into or out of trouble. In "My Dog Roscoe," a new bride becomes obsessed with the notion that her dead ex-boyfriend has returned to her in the form of a mongrel. In "Blood Work, 1999," a phlebotomist's desire to give away everything to the needy awakens her own sensuality. In "Home to Die," an abused woman takes revenge on her bedridden husband. In these fearless and darkly funny tales about women and those they love, Campbell has created characters that will capture the hearts and minds of her readers.

The stories in this prizewinning debut collection encompass train wrecks, circus acts, river journeys, transspecies transmogrification, and growing up and growing old around the small towns of Michigan. Without glamorizing poverty, Bonnie Jo Campbell details a vision in which shabbiness, beauty, brutality, and wisdom all coexist -- and yet the stories can be surprisingly optimistic, often funny. In "Sleeping Sickness," a twelve-year-old copes with the sexually charged atmosphere at home by carefully tending her vegetable garden. In "Bringing Home the Bones," a farmer who prides herself on self-sufficiency must lose her leg before she can meet her estranged daughters halfway. In "Eating Aunt Victoria," a young woman finally looks into the face of her dead mother's lesbian lover. Campbell's hard-working, sometimes hard-drinking, women protagonists are both dangerous and vulnerable, living without seat belts or televisions or the right kind of love. Not surprisingly, the children in these stories often look beyond human role models to dogs, cows, and even gorillas.

Combining the modern-farm-life realities of Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres with the quirky humor and eccentric characters of Carolyn Chute's The Beans of Egypt, Maine, Q Road is a charming debut from Bonnie Jo Campbell. Greenland Township, Michigan: On the same acres where farmers once displaced Potawatomi Indians, suburban developers now supplant farmers and prefab homes spring up in last year's cornfields. All along Q Road—or “Queer Road,” as the locals call it—the old, rural life collides weirdly with the new. With a cast of lovingly rendered eccentrics and a powerful sense of place, Q Road is a lively tale of nature and human desire that alters the landscape of contemporary fiction.

Fiction. In this anthology, through a variety of voices and venues, work and the workplace provide setting, metaphor, and meaning -- Bonnie Jo Campbell. In most ways this...is a perfect model of the American short story of work: intimate with the working experience, its work and culture, giving respect and space for the worker to speak his/her grief and joy within a collective sensibility, creating a form that exposes the effects of oppression and how character can be molded in resistance. It relies on a vibrant intimacy of voice through an oral, first-person narration and includes memoir to allow the life experience to find its own organic form -- Larry Smith.