Indiana, Indiana

(Paperback)

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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 familys 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.

is a beautiful and surreal story that illuminates the heart of rural America.

Reviews

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 forIndiana, Indiana

Laird Hunt is a marvelous writer and a gutsy oneinIndiana, Indianahe 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 readThe Impossiblyknows, Laird Hunts ability to create a sense of otherworldliness is astonishing.Indiana, Indianaresonates 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. Hes a seeker, in the best literary sense. Hes 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 forZorrie

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

A virtuosic portrait of midcentury America itselfphysically 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. . . . Hunts 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

Zorrieis a quiet novel about an ordinary life. And when youre ordinary, you need resilience like Zorries to survive in an uncaring world. Laird Hunts short and affecting novel follows Zorrie Underwoods life from childhood in Depression-era Indiana, when shes orphaned, to early adulthood, when shes 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 human life into just 161 pages that are polished like jewels.Scott Simon, NPR

Quietly effective. [Hunts] often lyrical prose traces Zorries hopes, griefs, loneliness, and resolve with remarkable economy. . . . A touching, tightly woven story from an always impressive author.Kirkus,starred review

A slight but poignant chronicle of a woman aloneand the grief, historic events and transformations that make her whole. . . .Zorrieis a novel that feels like it lives and breathes, and Hunts ability to interweave unimaginable beauty with poignant, deep longing makes it an instant American classic.Bookreporter

A powerful portrait of longing and community in the American Midwest. . . . Hunt chronicles the events of Zorries life with swiftness and precision, [and] a quiet sensitivity rarely seen in American fiction. . . .Zorrieis a poetic reminder of the importance of being a happy presence in other peoples memories.BookPage

Hunts storytelling flows smoothly, its rhythms unperturbed by preciousness or superfluous detail. Fans of Kent HarufsPlainsongtrilogy will love this subtle tale of rural life.Publishers Weekly

Hunt celebrates the majesty and depth in a life that may superficially seem undistinguished. . . . With compassion and realism, Hunt recounts Zorries story straightforwardly, with setting-appropriate dialogue and an eye for sensory details. . . . A beautifully written ode to the rural Midwest.Booklist

Hunt packs Zorrie's whole life in this slim book of fewer than 200 pages, but it doesn't feel short, nor does it feel too long. Zorrie's life may seem simple to some, but its a rich well of experiences worth exploring. Through loss, grief and tragedy, Hunt's lyrical and intimate novel shows that life is not a sum of its negative experiences but a collection of joyful moments.Shelf Awareness

A deceptively simple book about the curious forces that shape a life. . . . Hunts novel reads like poetry, evoking writers like Paul Harding and Marilynne Robinson, and radiates the heat of a beating heart.Vox

Courageous and profound.Worcester Telegram

This is not just a book you are holding in your hands; it is a life. Laird Hunt gives us here the portrait of a woman painted with the finest brush imaginable, while also rendering great historical shifts with bold single strokes. A poignant, unforgettable novel,Zorrieis Hunt at his best.Hernan Diaz

With patience, precision and language so clear and generous you feel as if you are being handed a precious and fragile truth, Laird Hunt brings us an indelible portrait of a twentieth-century American woman. Zorrie travels through her years with a straightforward decency that nevertheless does not shield her from harm, heartbreak, yearning, and a hard-won recognition of joy. It takes Hunt only a hundred and fifty pages to take us from one end of Zorries life to the other, and yet I closed the book feeling that I had read an epic.Marisa Silver

A sweeping, lyrical and profound portrait of a remarkable woman moving through the perils and wonders of 20th-century American life.Zorriewill break your heart with its propulsive beauty, depth and grace.Mona Awad

Zorrieis a beautiful novel. It is gentle, yet full of surprises, and Zorrie, the protagonist who loves her farm and Elvis, is a wonderful creation.Roddy Doyle

Laird HuntsZorrieis compelling from its first page, the prosody like a bolt of crinoline and serge and silk. Zorrie is no giant, but her life is as full and satisfying as the short novel, fecund with grain and clover, sweetgrass and damp earth, love, loss, and radiant Luna dust. I read it, with great pleasure, in one sitting.Nafissa Thompson-Spires

Zorrielives and breathes, as a character and as a book. In its natural movement, its joys embraced and sorrows faced, it is a moving portrait of one woman's lifeand so, by extension, a portrait of all of our lives. Laird Hunt has such a gift for clear and precise language, for conjuring the details that matter; the rhythms of mid-century mid-America are brought into being with subtle power. Eerily lit, at times, by a radium glow, this is a luminous book.Erica Wagner

Praise forKind One

Finalist for the 2013 PEN/Faulkner Award
Winner of the 2013 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award

This compact but reverberant 19th-century tale tracks a circle of hard-luck souls whose collective tears could fill a dry well. . . . Hunt passes the narration among the principle characters in woozily nonlinear fashion, lending a range of textures to this antebellum melodrama.New York Times Book Review

[Kind One] contains the sort of story that needs to be experienced directly. . . . You should get a hold of a copy and read it for yourself as soon as you can.Andrew Wille

There is always a surprise in the voice and in the heart of Laird Hunts storieswith its echoes of habit caught in a timeless dialect, so we see the world he gives us as if new. You hear something like that and it walks out the door with you.Michael Ondaatje

Laird HuntsKind One,about two slave girls who take their white mistress into captivity, is a profound meditation on the sexual and racial subconscious of America. Nothing is sacred here. Savagery begets savagery. Women commit unspeakable violence, wives are complicit in their husbands crimes, slave girls learn to be as cold and brutal as the masters who have raped and whipped them. Of course the center cannot hold. We watch it crumble with breath held, skin tingling, in this gorgeous and terrifying novel.Danzy Senna

[Kind One] is as devastating a piece of writing as anything one is likely to find in contemporary literature.Review of Contemporary Fiction

Opening with a prologue in the form of an extraordinarily beautiful meditation on loss, Hunts writing deepens into allegory, symbolism and metaphor, all while spinning forth a dark tale of abus

Author Bio

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 Littrature Amricaine, and Italys 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.