UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

Nona Caspers

Winner of the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction

The stories in this first collection deliver the reader into a world in which men, women, and children are on the cusp of some deeper consciousness. The writing gives lie to orderly images of Midwesterners and instead evokes with unnerving clarity an interior landscape that is primitive and quietly chaotic. This is life in the balance—"whole worlds at the moment of rupture." The children and adolescent characters search for a moral compass or center, while the adults tangle with their own desires. And yet in these unprotected places people thrive in unexpected ways.

"Throughout this collection, which was plucked from a pile of 300 manuscripts and awarded the Grace Paley Prize in short fiction, Caspers details the many ways reality can interfere with our dreams. Not surprisingly, dissatisfaction becomes a dominant theme. One of the best stories, 'Mr. Hellerman's Vacation,' takes place mainly in the occupational and group therapy units of a hospital and features a protagonist who 'always wanted a set of trained snow dogs and sled; instead he got a series of farm dogs, pleasant rangy mutts that followed him in and out of the barn and got run over in the driveway.' During his recuperation from an exhaustion-induced breakdown, he becomes preoccupied by an existential question: 'Does he own the farm or does the farm own him?' Many of Caspers's stories are set in Minnesota's cattle and dairy cuontry, and all of them traffic in the kind of Midwestern realism that doesn't rely on pyrotechnics to generate dramatic heat. Throughout, Caspers's people—it's difficult to consider some of them mere characters—question the decisions they've made or the ones they refuse to make. There's nothing flashy about Caspers's prose; like the beauty of the prairie itself, its attraction lies in details seen up close."

The New York Times Book Review

"Darkly funny, compassionate, and unsentimental, these quiet stories offer memorable, rarely seen views of midwestern life."

Booklist

"Revving up Willa Cather's naturalism and lesbian undertones with Denis Johnson's deadpan Plains rowdiness, these are like alt-country songs, tales of wild but not wild-eyed girls and women as likely to be enraptured by the girl next door as by the lay of the land. . . . Caspers ' pungent voice, her fairness to city and country mores, and the artful arrangement of her tales reward rereading. Simplicity this precise takes time, talent and considerable cultivation."

The San Fransico Chronicle

"In the story 'Vegetative States' one of the characters says, 'I stand at my Auntie Jenny's hospital bed and watch her breathe. That's all she has to do—makes living look easy.' The quiet, honest stories in Heavier Than Air make writing look easy. Like the ideal Midwesterners of the imagination, the stories are powerful and true without ever drawing undue attention to themselves. To read them is to be lulled into deceptively simple narratives only to have your heart broken in the end. The collection is full of characters poised between themselves and the other, caught in moments that reveal the bare essence of what they—and we—have been looking for all along. Simply beautiful."

Ana Menendez, author of When I Was in Cuba I Was a
German Shepherd and Loving Che

"Nona Caspers' Heavier Than Air is that rare book of short stories that seems larger and more expansive than the form. In it she captures whole worlds at the moment of rupture: farm girls and fathers in love with the wrong people; lives lost to AIDS; men driven to insanity by the pressures of the economy; women straying from religion into madness—people on farms and in big cities alike finding their lives entirely changed. And in that turmoil is Nona Caspers' steady, unfailing eye and ear, capturing what we need to hold to."

Maxine Chernoff, author of Some of Her Friends That Year
and Signs of Devotion

"These stories are beautiful and devastating and relentless. The quality and originality of language and wide range of subject matter are maintained throughout. What seems at first like quiet Midwestern 'domestic fiction' gradually and inevitably moves into extreme emotional and mental territory as a result of love and desire."

Wendy Brenner, author of Large Animals in Everyday Life
and Phone Calls from the Dead

"Few writers stare down the perils of love, in all its myriad forms, as honestly and with as much intensity as Nona Caspers. The stories in Heavier Than Air are classic, beautiful, and so achingly felt that you will feel as though you've lived them yourself."

Peter Orner, author of The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo

Nona Caspers migrated to San Francisco from rural Minnesota and is an assistant professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University. She has received an Iowa Fiction Award, a Cooper Award from the Ontario Review, a Barbara Deming Memorial Grant and Award, and a Joseph Henry Jackson Literary Grant and Award. Heavier Than Air is her first collection of short fiction.

Fiction
208 pp.
$24.95t cloth, ISBN 978-1-55849-556-2
November 2006

Published in cooperation with the Association of Writers & Writing Programs

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