From the National Book Award finalist and author of Once Upon a River comes a dazzling story collection featuring ferocious mothers and scrappy daughters. The strong but flawed women of Mothers, Tell Your Daughters love and betray one another; their richly fraught relationships can act as anchors, lifelines, or deadly poison. Bonnie Jo Campbell's working-class protagonists are at once vulnerable, wise, cruel, and funny, and they are always getting into or out of trouble. In "My Dog Roscoe," a new bride becomes obsessed with the notion that her dead ex-boyfriend has returned to her in the form of a mongrel. In "Blood Work, 1999," a phlebotomist's desire to give away everything to the needy awakens her own sensuality. In "Home to Die," an abused woman takes revenge on her bedridden husband. In these fearless and darkly funny tales about women and those they love, Campbell has created characters that will capture the hearts and minds of her readers.
Close Calls: The True Tales of Cougar Bob is a collection of twenty-six creative non-fiction short stories about courage, and what it takes to prove it. The Close Calls just bring it out in Cougar Bob. What does it take for North Idaho long distance runner, Robert L. Campbell, to get into the Navy if he is under weight? What does it take for him to walk again, and run, after polio in the Navy? To hunt down and trap a cougar that stalks kids at a school bus stop? To track an escaped killer with his man-trailing bloodhound? To face life-threatening blizzards? To swim rivers at ice flow, or be dropped on a rope across the Moyie Canyon to set a road survey point? Or to volunteer always for the toughest jobs?
Newsflashes from "The Cougar Bob Review," a twenty-year, mostly humorous, periodic two-page publication about the man, appear between the short stories in this AudioBook. In the "Review," author B. J. Campbell reveals the truth about her fervent, focused, brave husband, Cougar Bob.
Jim Lobretto has been awake for 24 hours, he's out of gas, and he's craving cigarettes. He's irritable and eager to be home, so when he's stopped by the police all he feels is annoyance. However, his next cigarette, the one he smokes while he's waiting for the cop to get out of his car, will spark a traumatic accident and drag Jim into a chain of events which only promise unspeakable agony and pain.
A finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Bonnie Jo Campbell is a rising star in contemporary fiction. Hailed by Booklist as a female Huckleberry Finn, Campbell's heroine is 16-year-old Margo Crane. Complicit in her father's death, Margo flees home for the Stark River. And as she follows the current, she learns the ways of the world from the eccentric characters she meets. "Set in rural Michigan, this book will surely vivify a side of American culture we don't often see."-Library Journal
The fiction of Bonnie Jo Campbell has been honored with the Pushcart Prize, the AWP Award for Short Fiction, and Southern Review's Eudora Welty Prize. In this stunning collection'a National Book Award finalist'Campbell's
rural Michigan characters are both as jagged as rusty metal and as delicate as the light brush of fading dreams.
'Readers ' will feel salvaged and transformed by this gutsy book's fierce compassion.''Booklist, starred review
