A Breath of Prairie and Other Stories

The prairie doesn't just surround these people, it shapes them, asks things of them. In this luminous collection of stories from the early 1900s, Will Lillibridge captures a world where the land stretches endlessly in all directions, where a family's entire existence hinges on weather and will, and where a young man named Guy Landers stands at the edge of everything he knows, wondering if there's life beyond the horizon. Guy and his brother Jim wake before dawn to do the chores. The routine is ancient, the landscape is eternal, and yet something in Guy rebels against the quiet certainty of farm life. His father is gone. The land demands continuity. But what happens when the son dreams of cities, of broader lives, of escape? Lillibridge weaves these intimate struggles against the prairie's vast indifference, the way dawn breaks over wheat fields like a promise no one made, the way isolation both strengthens and erodes the human heart. These are stories about what we owe to blood and soil, and what we owe to ourselves. They endure because they ask questions that never stop being urgent: Is staying loyalty or surrender? Is leaving courage or betrayal?