 |  |
 |  |  |  |  |  |
| Books> | Detailed Book Information |
Tax-exempt? | The Flatness and Other Landscapes From describing the details of mechanized cow-milking to relating the similarities between Indianapolis and the Greek city of Sparta, Martone subtly connects different cultures, times, and stories to depict the real and metaphorical landscapes of America's Heartland. Martone unites The Odyssey, Iowa farmers, a human genome map, American Gothic, and Captain James T. Kirk into a saga equal to any from classical mythology, showing us that a house, a farm, a town, a country, or a civilization has energy and dimension only through the stories of its inhabitants. The Flatness and Other Landscapes proves that our lives and the landscapes that surround us are only as flat as we perceive them to be. Michael Martone, a native of Fort Wayne, Indiana, now lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. He has published numerous books, including Seeing Eye and Fort Wayne Is Seventh on Hitler's List. September 2003
ISBN 0820324795 paper • Sale Price: $4.49 / List Price: $17.95 • 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 in.A volume in the seriesAssociation of Writers and Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction "This delightful train ride across the Midwest is highly recommended. . . . [Martone] writes about everyday towns, filled with everyday people. He describes the landscape with such passion that his essays become like word-paintings, and its inhabitants seem like characters in a film." —Booklist"Michael Martone writes with deep affection for the ordinary. In his hands, the quotidian dreams of the American Heartland are transformed and quietly exalted." —Louise Erdrich"As others have exalted America's mountains and coasts, so Martone strives to pen a love song to his beloved, if flat, home . . . He marks the Midwest with tales like thumbtacks, and in doing so not only calls attention to places that are 'hidden in plain sight,' but challenges his readers to think about the spaces between mappings, and the glittering stories waiting to be unearthed there."-Austin Chronicle "In Martone's world, practically every place is a small town cast into the wilderness, no matter its size. The close feeling of community and family surrounded by isolation and loneliness suffuses the best of his work."-Chicago Sun-Times "In essays robust and shapely, Martone directly confronts the puzzle of why the ordinary world is so special to a writer. At the same time, he distances himself from any claim of privilege just because he is a writer."-Indianapolis Star "Martone's gracefully written collection evokes the geography and people of the Midwest in the rhythms and dialects of the place . . . By focusing the full power of his wide-ranging curiosity on specifice-on a stalled tractor, on windmills, on the particular house portrayed in Grant Wood's 'American Gothic'-Martone reminds us of the transcendent, the connection to the sacred, present in our everyday lives. He reveals the inner light that gleams within our 'flattest,' most mundane moments."-Minneapolis Star-Tribune "Martone sounds like Thoreau when he meditates on windmills . . . At his best, Martone has a knack for finding meaning in the mundane, in the very flatness of Midwestern landscapes . . . Someone should send Martone on a long sabbatical to write the Great Midwestern Novel."-Kirkus Reviews "Like a rosary in which each elaborately carved bead requires its own time for reflection, Martone's essays deserve to be read from beginning to end with no jumping around."-Book "Martone's collection is a welcome addition to an important and growing body of literature defining the new reality of the Midwest. Martone's essays belong on a shelf with the fiction of Jane Smiley and the poetry of Ted Kooser."-Marc J. Sheehan, Fourth Genre |
|
|
| ©2003 The University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved. Read our privacy statement. |