| Format: | Ebook |
| Page Count: | 64 |
| Size: | 5.5 in x 7.5 in |
| ISBN-UPC: | 9781433527395 |
| ePub ISBN: | 978-1-4335-2739-5 |
| PDF ISBN: | 978-1-4335-2737-1 |
| Mobipocket ISBN: | 978-1-4335-2738-8 |
| Published: | September 30, 2011 |
“Mette Iversdatter’s window was a porthole on the winter sky.” With this spare, vivid image, Larry Woiwode brings us into the simple and anxious rhythms of life for a Norwegian farm girl in the first decade of the twentieth century. Christmas Eve falls in the midst of deprivation as Mette’s family prepares to journey to her grandparents’ farm for Christmas. When her father fails to bag a big deer on the journey, they arrive, like everyone else, almost empty-handed. Yet despite frustration and disappointment, this extended family combines their meager resources to create an unexpected marvel of a meal that transforms the family’s Christmas.
Sharply observed and crisply written, Woiwode’s story throbs with truths known to human hearts in any century. He carefully renders the hesitant hopes of a child, the aching disappointments and steady perseverance of her elders, and the surprise of beauty and joy. That prayers may yet be answered—that the provision may be greater even than the promise—is a truth for Christmas and always.
Author:
Larry Woiwode was a Guggenheim and Lannan Fellow, recipient of the William Faulkner Foundation Award and John DosPassos Prize, a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Book Critics Circle Award, and has received the Medal of Merit from the American Academy of Arts and Letters “for distinction in the art of the short story.” His work has been featured in publications such as The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Books & Culture, and The Atlantic. He was Poet Laureate of North Dakota, Writer-in-Residence at Jamestown College, and author of Words Made Fresh and Words for Readers and Writers.
Product Details
Endorsements
“Woiwode has a poet’s sensibility, and his scenes can resonate with perfect descriptions, not a detail astray. . . . I could go on enumerating the solidity and effective voice with which Woiwode sketches his world.”
The New York Times Book Review
“Here is a writer truly of American grain, a writer whose prose throbs with affection for and understanding of the land and its people.”
The Washington Post Book World
“He continues to be a writer who can not only dazzle . . . but illuminate. . . . There is something organic, whole, and necessary about his work; it blows fuses.”
The Boston Globe
“One reads Woiwode as much for the power and stunning beauty of his prose as for any story he chooses to tell.”
The Philadelphia Inquirer
“He writes with a sense of both the quicksilver movement of language on the run and the reflective inner drag and furrowing of thought.”
The New York Times Book Review