Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, this collection of loosely connected tales returns readers to the American Northwest so finely observed and powerfully evoked in John Keeble’s previous, celebrated works.
Nocturnal America occupies a terrain at once familiar and strange, where homecoming and dislocation can coincide, and families can break apart or hone themselves on the hard edges of daily life. In these stories, Keeble populates what journalist Joel Garreau once called the “Empty Quarter” of North America with complex humanity. Life ranges vibrantly through these airy spaces, at times finding itself thrown up against the shifty terrors of political change and the antic scrim of culture.
Keeble’s stories hinge on love—its difficulty, its loss and pangs, but also its discovery of good fortune and even illumination in steadiness through travail. As his characters come and go, unexpectedly converging, vanishing, or reappearing, their stories reach beyond the ordinariness of life and the particularities of place to create something akin to community.
“Like the setting, this book is rich and rewarding.”—Publishers Weekly
“Writers write about the same 10 things over and over. Love, hate, loyalty, betrayal, innocence, guilt, birth, death, hope, despair. . . . There’s nothing new to write about. In the wrong hands, stories can be too familiar. In the right hands, stories show us how we live. John Keeble’s hands are the right ones. . . . In issues of craft, Keeble is first-rate.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review
“[Nocturnal America is] fiction with characterization as deep and broad as any writer might draw—at times luminous, at times heartbreaking. . . . [T]he University of Nebraska Press proves again its ability to print what deserves to be published. . . . These stories have an edge so sharp it cuts, but they also hold the soft place of a conflicted heart. Writers like Keeble do not often tell us what we want to know, but they do tell us what we fear to know. If Nocturnal America is often dark, Keeble’s work also flickers with a distant light.”—Bloomsbury Review
“Keeble’s Pacific Northwest [is] a rich and desolate landscape that yields a limitless trove of both peril and passion. . . . Keeble is adept at speaking from either the male or female point of view. . . . Daily existence is a wild and precarious dance in Keeble’s world, where lives gingerly balance between hope and grief.”—Booklist
"This collection of loosely interwoven short stories is a haunting and touching look at love and life in the Pacific Northwest."—Library Journal
“John Keeble’s beautifully rendered short-story collection, Nocturnal America, examines the power of family, love and place. . . . The author’s feel for people and place are key to this outstanding collection.”—Sybil Downing, Denver Post
“Nocturnal America, winner of the 2006 Prairie Schooner Prize for fiction, is a supremely satisfying set of nine loosely connected stories that interweave raw emotion, spiritual searching and violence. . . . Keeble illuminates his characters with uncommon clarity, showing the care of an author who’s spent 30 years perfecting his form.”—Mary Ann Gwinn, Seattle Times
“[Keeble] succeeds in building an entire community, with a history that haunts and sustains and explains the present-day generation. Nocturnal America is a remarkably involving work.” —Barbara McMichael, Olympian (Olympia, WA)
"[Keeble] is absolutely convincing in the viewpoints of both men and women, and has a lovely ability to drop luminous observation into an apparently mundane moment of the narrative."—Janet Burroway, author of Raw Silk and Writing Fiction
"This is a real writer, with an authenticity of place and character."—Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain