Rerun Era

(Hardback)

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Description

Rerun Era is a captivating, propulsive memoir about growing up in the environmentally and economically devastated rural flatlands of Oklahoma, the entwinement of personal memory and the memory of popular culture, and a family thrown into trial by lost love and illness that found common ground in the television. Told from the magnetic perspective of Joanna Howard's past selves from the late '70s and early '80s, Rerun Eracircles the fascinating psyches of her part-Cherokee teamster truck-driving father, her women's libber mother, and her skateboarder, rodeo bull-riding teenage brother.
Illuminating to our rural American present, and the way popular culture portrays the rural American past, it perfectly captures the irony of growing up in rural America in the midst of nationalistic fantasies of small town local sheriffs and saloon girls, which manifested the urban cowboy, wild west theme-parks, and The Beverly Hillbillies.

Reviews

Chicago Review of Books, "Best Books of Oct 2019"
Literary Hub, "Twelve Books You Should Read This October" (2019)
Excerpted in The Paris Review Daily, October 10, 2019

"The thing about eras is that, someday, they're bygone, and Howard records
this one with clarity and a kind of reverence. This is both funny and touching, and likely to reach readers in wholly unexpected ways."
- Booklist

"This is a short, fast, laugh-out-loud read, but it's sticky; Rerun Era will keep playing in the reader's mind like the earworms of childhood."
-Buzzfeed

"Rerun Era captures the sounds, smells, and emotional tenor of growing up in rural Oklahoma. Entwined with Howard's memories of countrified TV and movies (she loved Smoky and the Bandit even more than Robin Hood) are those of her cheating, truck-driving father and her women's rights activist mother. Together, these memories portray a part of America--and its provincial popular culture--rarely explored in literature."
-Literary Hub

Rerun Era is both a romp and a deep dive through a late-70s-and-80s childhood, where many of us were remanded to the television for caretaking, fueled on the intoxicants of processed foods, where the day was vast and sometimes, particularly if you were down south, crushing with heat or emptiness or endless lots of red mud. There is a warm hilarity that moves through this book and a kind of cracking pain that follows. It's a story of time, family, culture, and subjectivity we all need to read, written with a wild, quiet, and wide intelligence.
- Renee Gladman

Children are given the gift and burden of feeling the infinite in a single afternoon, an hour, an event-Rerun Era, a wonderfully tactile and intimate book, returns that gift to its readers. Each chapter explodes with the force and shine of fireworks on an unlit night.
- Catherine Lacey

Joanna Howard has a masterful understanding of the way memory bends time and forms startling new structures from the patterns of good sameness, bad sameness, strange sameness that compose our lives. She tunnels through this sameness to the glorious specificity at its core, so that these swathes of childhood recaptured feel like they belong to me, even though I know that I never witnessed my own life with such penetrating beauty or insight. Rerun Era is startling and new on every page, a book that you will find yourself in, lose yourself in, and long to return to again and again.
- Alexandra Kleeman

"Deftly written, with a tonal command that complements a child's observations with an adult's insights."
-Kirkus Reviews

"It's [Howard's] un-self-conscious, observational deadpan that lends humor and wit to an otherwise heartbreaking tale. This partnership between past and present Howard is the source of the memoir's poignancy; each shows the other is missing through memories."
-Ploughshares

Author Bio

Joanna Howard is a writer and translator from Miami, Oklahoma. She is the author of the novel Foreign Correspondent, the story collections On the Winding Stair and In the Colorless Round, and Field Glass, a collaborative novel written with Joanna Ruocco. She also co-translated Walls by Marcel Cohen and Cows by Frederic Boyer. She teaches in the literature PhD program at Denver University.