Lamb Bright Saviors

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Lamb Bright Saviors

Robert Vivian

Flyover Fiction Series

198 pages

Paperback

March 2010

978-0-8032-1380-7

$22.95 Add to Cart

About the Book

“Robert Vivian’s prose is lyrical and harrowing—harrowing in the Biblical sense,” Sven Birkerts said of The Mover of Bones, the first book in Vivian’s Tall Grass Trilogy. That same lyrical power carries this new volume to a place of hard-won hope and redemption at once both spiritual and earthly.
 
Lamb Bright Saviors begins as an apocalyptically inclined itinerant preacher staggers across the Nebraska prairie. With his young assistant, Mady, in tow hauling a wagon stacked with bibles, it’s not long before the preacher finds he’s come to the final fulfillment of his self-proclaimed life’s work: to die in front of a group of strangers. Odd as his own end-of-days might be, the lives and struggles of the strangers attending this deathbed scene are even odder. As the dying preacher unleashes a barrage of hallucinatory ramblings and rantings in the hope of imparting wisdom, each ragtag member of this unlikely congregation must reckon with his or her own dark past. And, through it all, the irrepressible Mady lends the preacher’s strange performance a surprising and unforgettable dignity and humor.

Author Bio

Robert Vivian is a professor of English and creative writing at Alma College in Michigan and also teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. He is the author of The Mover of Bones (Nebraska 2006) and Cold Snap as Yearning, available in a Bison Books edition.

Praise

"Vivian is a latter-day Faulkner set loose with no editorial restraints, so there is no need to suspend your disbelief for this story. You can only go along for the brilliantly written ride, full of sound and fury that signifies little but moves us intensely."—Publishers Weekly

"This spare and powerful work by the author of The Mover of Bones will find a select audience with literary fiction fans."—Ann H. Fisher, Library Journal

"Lamb Bright Saviors delivers a powerful story within its mere 185 pages. Calling upon the vast prairies of the physical landscape and the crowded alleys of the human mind, Robert Vivian guides us through the possibilities of failure and redemption in a profound yet immensely readable novel."—Christy Corp-Minamiji, Blogcritics

"Robert Vivian's novel has more than enough plot to satisfy. . . . The real star here is Vivian's use of language, poetic and rich, which makes an apocalyptic story that takes place in a small room become almost biblical in proportion."—Kel Munger, newsreview.com

"This profound character study is a terrific look into the souls of six people seeking redemption. . . . The novella contains a stark Nebraska atmosphere that enhances the story line."—Harriet Klausner, Midwest Book Review

"Robert Vivian writes with an eye for detail and an ear for music, composing stories from sentences as shapely as Baroque scrollwork and fun as a carnival ride."—Kelly Lenox, powells.com

Table of Contents

Noon Song
Mady
Oly
Godsick
Yarborough
Mady
Munoz
Twilight Song
Marian
Oly
Gus
Mady
Yarborough
Gus
Yarborough
Munoz
Evensong
Mady

Awards

Winner of the 2011 Nebraska Book Awards, Fiction Category

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