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Book Cover for: Indiana, Indiana, Laird Hunt

Indiana, Indiana

Laird Hunt

A mesmerizing, poignant saga of love and loss firmly grounded in the Midwestern landscape by National Book Award finalist Laird Hunt.

On a dark and lovely winter night, Noah Summers sits before a roaring fire, drifting between sleep and recollection, trying to make sense of a lifetime of psychic visions and his family's tumultuous history on an Indiana farmstead. Decades have passed since Noah first fell in love with Opal, a brilliant but unstable young woman whose penchant for flames separated the couple after just forty-two idyllic days of married life. Despite the challenges they each faced, their love never wavered in the long years that followed, sustained by letters, memories, and the bonds of family.

Indiana, Indiana establishes the world Laird Hunt returned to in National Book Award finalist Zorrie and introduces the character of Zorrie Underwood for the first time. Written in a masterful elegiac style reminiscent of William Faulkner and Marilynne Robinson, Indiana, Indiana is a beautiful and surreal story that illuminates the heart of rural America.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Coffee House Press
  • Publish Date: Mar 21st, 2023
  • Pages: 200
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.20in - 5.50in - 0.70in - 0.55lb
  • EAN: 9781566896658
  • Categories: SagasLiterarySmall Town & Rural

About the Author

Laird Hunt is the author of Zorrie, which was a 2021 finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. He has also been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and won the Anisfield-Wolf Award for Fiction, the Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine, and Italy's Bridge Prize. His reviews and essays have been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and many others. He teaches in the Department of Literary Arts at Brown University and lives in Providence.

Praise for this book

"Indiana, Indiana is told in a polyphonic delirium, an incantatory whirlwind that disorients us as it strives to deliver Noah from the pain of his separation from Opal. . . . It is a tender, youthful novel, an ode to devotional romantic love that seems almost otherworldly in its innocence and to the quiet gothic landscape of Indiana, as benevolent as it is unsettling." -Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, from the introduction

Praise for Indiana, Indiana

"Laird Hunt is a marvelous writer and a gutsy one--in Indiana, Indiana he offers an intimate reverie of people and place that, for its lyricism, odd humor, and delicacy, evokes the early Ondaatje." --Rikki Ducornet

"As everyone who read The Impossibly knows, Laird Hunt's ability to create a sense of otherworldliness is astonishing. Indiana, Indiana resonates for miles." --Amy Fusselman

"Like the best American writers, Laird Hunt is recasting the American song, lyrically and philosophically. His novels are smart and refreshing and genuinely unusual. He's a seeker, in the best literary sense. He's looking for and finding vivid language and forms, ways to write what he sees and understands about his and our weird, fortunate, and troubled lives and times." --Lynne Tillman

Praise for Zorrie

Finalist, National Book Awards 2021 for Fiction
Kirkus, "Best Books of 2021"
Oprah Daily,
"Most Anticipated Historical Fiction Novels of 2021"

"A virtuosic portrait of midcentury America itself―physically stalwart, unerringly generous, hopeful that tragedy can be mitigated through faith in land and neighbor alike. . . . This is not fiction as literary uproar. This is a refined realism of the sort Flaubert himself championed, storytelling that accrues detail by lean detail. . . . Hunt's prose is galvanized by powerful questions. Who were those forebears who tilled the land for decades, seemingly without complaint? How did they fashion happiness, or manage soaring passions, in their conformist communities? He re-examines the pastoral with ardent precision. . . . What Hunt ultimately gives us is a pure and shining book, an America where community becomes a 'symphony of souls, ' a sustenance greater than romance or material wealth for those wise enough to join in." --New York Times Book Review

"A slim yet profound portrait of the life of an Indiana woman named Zorrie, spanning a humble lifetime shaped by the events of the 20th century." --USA Today

"Zorrie is a quiet novel about an ordinary life. And when you're ordinary, you need resilience like Zorrie's to survive in an uncaring world. Laird Hunt's short and affecting novel follows Zorrie Underwood's life from childhood in Depression-era Indiana, when she's orphaned, to early adulthood, when she's left on her own, to an eventual marriage and working life." --Oprah Daily

"Through an ordinary life of hard work and simple pleasures, Zorrie comes to learn the real wonder is life itself. A quiet, beautifully done, and memorable novel." --Library Journal, starred review

"The National Book Award finalist of a novel packs a whole, absorbing hu