The Agriculture Hall of Fame: Stories [Paperback]

These powerful stories limn the complexities and dilemmas of life in Kansas, a state at the center of the center of America, as a billboard in one story announces. Andrew Malan Milward explores the less visible aspects of the Kansas experiencewhere its agrarian past comes into conflict with the harsh present reality of drugs, fundamentalism, and corporatism, relegating its agrarian identity to museums and amusement parks.

Presented in a triptych, the stories in Milward's debut collection range across a varied terrain, from tumbledown rural barns to modern urban hospitals, revealing the secrets contained therein.

A native of Lawrence, Kansas,ANDREW MALAN MILWARDis a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He has served as a McCreight Fiction Fellow at the University of Wisconsin, a Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University, a Writing Fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and a Resident Artist at the Santa Fe Art Institute. His fiction has appeared in many places, including Zoetrope, The Southern Review, Columbia, Conjunctions, and Best New American Voices 2010. He lives in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where he is a Visiting Writer at the University of Southern Mississippi.

1. Quail Haven, 1989
2. Skywriting
3. The Agriculture Hall of Fame
4. John
5. Two Back, 1973
6. Birthday
7. Ulysses
8. The Cure for Cancer
9. The Antichrist Chronicles
10. Silver Creek, 1969

Acknowledgments

The 10 gorgeous stories that make up this Juniper Prize-winning debut collection from Milward, a Kansas native and Iowa M.F.A. graduate, offer unique glimpses into Midwestern calamities and the folks who find themselves affected by them. In Milward's world, there's nary a sunny sky in sight, with characters who are all reversed in some ways, our lives shading backwards like the shadows on the moon. But this gloominess is greatly buoyed by the author's poetic prose and a pitch-perfect eye for detail, resultiló“