Sunday, May 09, 2010

What is Adam Schuitema reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Adam Schuitema, author of the new story collection, Freshwater Boys.

One paragraph from his entry:
I recently read Bonnie Jo Campbell’s latest story collection, American Salvage. It’s been receiving tremendous critical acclaim, and rightfully so. Campbell zooms in on small-town, blue-collar life in Southwest Michigan, the settings so earthy they seem to put dirt under your fingernails. There’s sex and drugs and violence, and yet—remarkably—loveliness. This is the result, in large part, to her incredible prose. But just as important is the dignity with which Campbell treats her...[read on]
Among the early praise for Freshwater Boys:
“Michigan native Schuitema explores the lakeside life of his home state with deep enthusiasm in this debut collection, candidly recounting the passage through childhood, youth, and adulthood… the stories contain numerous moments of memorable, tension-filled sensual descriptions, as in the harrowing search for a missing boy in ‘Camouflage Fall,’ where the ‘glacial residue glowing under a cool glacial moon’ coupled with the notion that a ‘flashlight seemed like a thin dagger compared to the huge chunks of darkness’ stand as one of the book’s many moments of crisp, effective prose.”
Publishers Weekly

“Michigan, the state with the largest fresh water coastline, is our Third Coast, and writers, such as Ernest Hemingway and Jim Harrison, who have best evoked its landscape and character, have fittingly laced their Michigan stories with its rivers. Freshwater Boys, Adam Schuitema’s deeply engaging first collection, extends this tradition and, in so doing, renders an American Lake Country.”
—Stuart Dybek, author of I Sailed with Magellan and The Coast of Chicago
Visit the official Freshwater Boys website.

Writers Read: Adam Schuitema.

--Marshal Zeringue