Blue Earth

by Anya Achtenberg

Overview

Blue Earth is a compelling novel of Minnesota, a land that guards its secrets. Carver Heinz loses both farm and family in the farm crisis of the 1980s. Displaced into urban Minneapolis, he becomes obsessed with Angie, a beautiful child he rescues from a tornado in an encounter he insists they keep silent. Her close friendship with a Dakota Indian boy fuels Carver’s rage and unleashes a series of events that reveal the haunting power of each character's past and of their shared histories, especially the 1862 Dakota Conflict and public hanging of 38 Dakota--the largest mass execution in U.S. history.

Learn more at www.AnyaAchtenberg.com

From the Reflections of History Series at Modern History Press www.ModernHistoryPress.com

Product Details

BN ID:	2940014982955
Publisher:	Modern History Press
Publication date:	07/21/2012
Series:	Reflections of America , #10
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	226
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Anya Achtenberg is an award-winning fiction writer and poet. Her publications include the novel "Blue Earth", and autobiographical novella "The Stories of Devil-Girl", both with Modern History Press; and poetry books, "The Stone of Language", published by West End Press after being finalist in five poetry competitions; and "I Know What the Small Girl Knew" (Holy Cow! Press). Her short fiction has received awards from Coppola's Zoetrope: All-Story, New Letters, the Raymond Carver Story Contest, and others.

She is at work on History Artist, a novel centering in a Cambodian woman born of an African American father and Cambodian mother at the moment the U.S. bombing of Cambodia began. This work received a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. She is also writing a book of poetry and short prose, The Matadors at
the Crossing.

Anya teaches creative writing workshops and classes around the country and online with growing international participation, and offers manuscript consultations and coaching for fiction writers, memoirists, and poets. She also organizes groups of writers, artists, filmmakers and educators to travel to Cuba. Along with her numerous fiction and memoir workshops, she developed and teaches a series of multi-genre workshops on Writing for Social Change (Re-Dream a Just World; Place and Exile/ Borders and Crossings; and Yearning and Justice: Writing the Unlived Life), which she has started writing into a movable workshop.

Visit Anya at www.AnyaAchtenberg.com

Editorial Reviews

"We... see our own lives reflected in Blue Earth's dark mirror, even as we learn a tragic history kept from us by those who would forever erase our origins... This is a brilliant novel by one of our truly intuitive and accomplished writers"
--Margaret Randall, author of "Ruins"

Ruins - Margaret Randall

"Achtenberg's passionate, brilliantly crafted language, combined with her profound ethical imagination, makes Blue Earth one of the most important books to appear at this moment in our history."
--Demetria Martinez, author of "Mother Tongue"

Mother Tongue - Demetria Martinez

"Achtenberg creates morally complex and culturally diverse characters whose lives are affected by loss, poverty, disease, and war, but whose ultimately redemptive encounters with one another take Blue Earth far beyond its Midwester setting."
--Martha Collins, author of "Blue Front"

Blue Front - Martha Collins

"In the great tradition of Willa Cather and Wallace Stegner, Anya Achtenberg writes of the violence, past and present, that shapes the people of the vast American Midwest. Deep and searing, Blue Earth is perhaps one of the best novels of the past decade."
--Kathleen Spivack, author of "With Robert Lowell and His Circle"

Robert Lowell and His Circle - Kathleen Spivack