UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

Stories

Book Jacket: "Women and Other Animals" by B.J. Campbell

Bonnie Jo Campbell

Winner of the Associated Writing Programs Award for Short Fiction

"The Smallest Man in the World" received a Pushcart Prize for one of the best short stories of 1999

Runner up, Great Lakes College Association Award

A collection of stories about mothers, daughters, and animal kinship

These richly imaginative stories encompass train wrecks, circus acts, river journeys, transspecies transmogrification, and growing up and growing old around the small towns of Michigan. Here both nature and man can threaten a woman, but neither does more damage than her own choices. Bonnie JO Campbell's hardworking, sometimes hard-drinking protagonists live precisely the lives they make for themselves, and it is not surprising that children look beyond human role models to dogs, milk cows, even gorillas.

Though Campbell never glamorizes poverty, she details a vision in which shabbiness, beauty, brutality, and wisdom all coexist, and the stories can be surprisingly optimistic, often funny. These women of Michigan's lower peninsula may live without automotive safety belts or televisions or the right kind of love, but they are able to trust their instincts and are ultimately drawn to whatever can save them.

In "Sleeping Sickness" a twelve-year-old girl copes with the sexually charged atmosphere created by her mother's new boyfriend. In "Bringing Home the Bones" a woman must lose her leg before she can come to terms with her estranged daughters. In "Running" the narrator obsesses about the mating habits of birds and the promiscuity of her neighbor's daughter while her own fertility trickles away. In "Eating Aunt Victoria" a young woman finally looks into the face of her dead mother's lesbian lover. In "Shifting Gears" a man buys a new truck in order to get over his wife's leaving, but can't stop thinking about the pregnant woman next door.

"Campbell's stories are alive, rich with humor and unpredictable but ultimately credible turns, keenly observed and told with a savvy narrative drive. One can feel in them the love on the part of the author for the strange, the grotesque, the eccentric; but these aspects are never treated in a way that makes the stories freakish. Campbell's ability to find the humanity in misfits as well as her strong sense of place reminds me of some of our best writers from the South."

Stuart Dybek

Bonnie Jo Campbell lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Fiction
208 pp.
LC 99-15159
$32.50s cloth, ISBN 1-55849-219-4
1999

Published in association with the The Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) , a nonprofit literary and educational organization serving 280 college and university creative writing programs.

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