Beautiful writing, as always. Perry is his usual introspective, humorous and insightful self. I was impressed by the respect and tenderness he shows his parents despite his somewhat different take on religion. It is easy to see, though, how much they have helped him become the loving father and...
Michael and his family live on a farm in rural Wisconsin. At the present, he is earning a living as a writer but he has not lost touch with his family’s deep agricultural roots. His first visit to his present neighbor’s, Tom Hartwig, kitchen was “a place I’d never visited, but I knew where I was...
WARNING: Possibly ill-advised, slightly intoxicated soap-boxing lies ahead. Proceed at your own risk.The title of this book is slightly misleading in that it implies Michael Perry will introduce the reader to a rich, quirky swath of characters who inhabit a very small town. While there are a few ...
My book group is meeting next Tuesday (that's four days from now) and I haven't started either of the two books we're supposed to discuss. One of them I have; the other I'll need to borrow. Which rebuked me into finishing up the last one I borrowed, which we discussed a couple of months ago when ...
Sick people puke, dying people puke, excited people puke, people puke while they’re having heart attacks, they puke when their lacerated brains swell, they puke because they get carsick lying on the cot looking up at the dome lights.I got the puke christening early. I was in training, still doing...
What he needed was eggs and bacon and good fresh-ground coffee, but what he craved was the instantaneous fix of a gas station pastry washed down with a Styrofoam cup of industrial drip, both available at the Kwik Pump. For that matter, maybe he’d go for a drive. It was one of his favorite things,...
my farmer father would say whenever things went wrong. In fact, in our family all of us—even the nonfarmers—still use that phrase in the context of bad news. But sometimes when the corn sprouts on time or the chickens really fill the egg basket or I catch my daughter slopping hogs while wearing a...
It’s hard, tough, loud work. Lots of banging and ripping and hacking. Certain things have special value: big hunks of sheet metal, heavy shafts (like the axles we took to Freda on our last trip), and copper wire. Toad says in the old days he would have just cut everything apart with a blowtorch, ...
The following book is set in the years 2003–2004. Using items including calendars, notebooks, correspondence, snapshots, and even receipts from Farm & Fleet, I have done my best to assure that chronology and veracity have been honored. Mistakes may be found. In some cases, names have been cha...
