One-Room Schoolhouse

Here - in more than one hundred perfectly pitched, sometimes perverse, and always surprising stories - Jim Heynen displays his mastery of country wisdom, speech, and behavior as he reveals "the boys" in all their oddity, wonder, and puzzlement. These are midwestern farm kids finding their way, contending with grown-ups, city kids, birth, bats, death, rats, skunks, and even mean ponies. Or choosing between corncobs and peach tissues, hurling rotten eggs, getting in trouble, helping out, and trying to conceive of the mountains and oceans and forests they've never seen. Their adventures are an education in the natural world, as well as an acknowledgment of whatever is common or strange in human nature. "These stories resemble legends more than anything else," according to CoEvolution Quarterly, "based as they are on experiences and responses that could occur anywhere at any time.". The importance of all this - for the boys and for us - is in discovering what to make of a way of life that is disappearing before our disbelieving eyes. And in this, his first major collection, Jim Heynen shows himself to be an unsurpassed observer and storyteller whose work - whether true or just funny, sad or even magical - is very much in the American grain.