Five titles with small-town settings

Carolyn Kuebler was a co-founder of the literary magazine Rain Taxi and for the past ten years she has been the editor of the New England Review. Her stories and essays have been published in The Common and Colorado Review, among others, and “Wildflower Season,” published in The Massachusetts Review, won the 2022 John Burroughs Award for Nature Essay.

Kuebler’s debut novel is Liquid, Fragile, Perishable.

At Lit Hub she tagged "five books that, with their small-town settings and multiple points of view, could be placed in the tradition of [Sherwood Anderson's] Winesburg, Ohio—and yet, like my own, are nothing like Anderson’s at all." One title on the list:

Linda Legarde Grover, A Song over Miskwaa Rapids

Linda Legarde Grover’s latest novel, set in the fictional Mozhay Point Ojibwe reservation in northern Minnesota, also bears all the hallmarks of small-town fiction, with its layered interpersonal connections, its inescapably present past, and its multiple points of view—including, briefly, a zoom out to the robin who opens and closes the book with his morning song, opiichii, opiichii niin!, starting the new day with his song of “everything that has ever happened.”

On the surface, the book concerns the legal maneuverings around an allotment of land that the tribal government is hoping to purchase from Margie Robineau, who has become deeply attached to the place over the course of her youthful friendships, loveships, and marriage, and has no interest in selling. Hidden beneath the present but concerning these same people, this same land, is a story from half a century earlier, which occupies the center of the book.

Adding yet another dimension are several deceased ancestors—far more gossipy than ghostly—who pull up their lawn chairs and watch over the place. They bicker over the coffee, offer prayers to the Creator, and devise a simple scheme to uncover an unsolved mystery and disrupt the course of events. A dark history of betrayals and losses is always close at hand, but so are the laughter and pleasure that these characters take in each other and in the land they love.

The past is not past, and it is especially unavoidable at the Miskwaa River and Mozhay Point, places Grover returns to frequently in her stories and novels, working these characters’ stories to the surface one by one, lifting them to the light and then burying them again.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue