Farmer's Almanac: A Work of Fiction

by Chris Fink, Bonnie Jo Campbell (Foreword by)

Overview

Farmer's Almanac cracks open America's rural core to reveal moments of stark beauty and cruelty-a Midwestern Gothic. An imaginary handbook for rural living as timeless and essential as its namesake. But this is no American pastoral. Fink's vision is more Orwell than Rockwell. Farmer's Almanac reports the news from mythical Odette County, Wisconsin, where the milk prices keep falling, and the forecast is not good.

Now includes a foreword by Bonnie Jo Campbell!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781938473357
Publisher:	Forty Press
Publication date:	01/09/2024
Pages:	252
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x 0.57(d)

About the Author

Chris Fink is a professor at Beloit College in Wisconsin, wherehe teaches literature, creative writing, and journalism. He is the 2020 Society of Midland Authors award winner, author of Add This to the List of Things That You Are and editor of the Beloit Fiction Journal.

Bonnie Jo Campbell is the author of the novels Once Upon a River and Q Road. Her critically acclaimed short fiction collections include American Salvage, which was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critic's Circle Award; Women and Other Animals, which won the AWP Prize for Short Fiction; and Mothers, Tell Your Daughters. She was a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"These moody, compelling stories about Odette County, Wisconsin, bring to mind other fictional American places, such as Yoknapatawpha County, Spoon River, Gopher Prairie, Port William, and Winesburg, Ohio. Like his predecessors, from William Faulkner to Wendell Berry, Chris Fink shows us characters living on back roads and in small towns with as much drama and dignity, as much passion and perplexity, as one might find in the lives of people anywhere. His gaze is clear-eyed and unsentimental, his voice is free of disdain and charged with earthy eloquence."
—Scott Russell Sanders, author of Earth Works: Selected Essays

"Farmer’s Almanac is one of the most evocative collections I’ve read on the limitations and hard pleasures of small-town rural life, and manual labor. Chris Fink writes beautifully about characters who, when set upon by the limitations of where they live, adapt, and then discover that every so often, as a reward, the world will open up to them."
—Jim Shepard, author of You Think That's Bad and Like You'd Understand, Anyway

"Rock-picking, fight-picking, finger-licking, this is muscular writing from deep within the American heartland. Farmer's Almanac is full of unexpected tenderness when you were expecting brutality, and ready with all kinds of ructions whenever you think there might be routines. Chris Fink is the authentic voice of American agricultural labour. Watch out, latte-slurping salonnières, he's coming down the river and raising hell!"

—Giles Foden, author of The Last King of Scotland

Editorial Reviews

"In Farmer's Almanac, you can be assured all the men are not good-looking, all the women are not strong and all the children aren't above average...Fink is not afraid to get the muck of country living into his fiction."
—Jim Higgins, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

"From the outside looking in, Odette County might seem like a place where not much happens, but what Chris Fink reminds the reader is that, while the landscape might be unremarkable, the people who live there are not. Much like the stories in this fine collection, they are complex, multicolored, and not to be overlooked."
—Natalie Sypolt, The Los Angeles Review

"These moody, compelling stories about Odette County, Wisconsin, bring to mind other fictional American places, such as Yoknapatawpha County, Spoon River, Gopher Prairie, Port William, and Winesburg, Ohio. Like his predecessors, from William Faulkner to Wendell Berry, Chris Fink shows us characters living on back roads and in small towns with as much drama and dignity, as much passion and perplexity, as one might find in the lives of people anywhere. His gaze is clear-eyed and unsentimental, his voice is free of disdain and charged with earthy eloquence."
—Scott Russell Sanders, author of Earth Works: Selected Essays

"Farmer’s Almanac is one of the most evocative collections I’ve read on the limitations and hard pleasures of small-town rural life, and manual labor. Chris Fink writes beautifully about characters who, when set upon by the limitations of where they live, adapt, and then discover that every so often, as a reward, the world will open up to them."
—Jim Shepard, author of You Think That's Bad and Like You'd Understand, Anyway

"Rock-picking, fight-picking, finger-licking, this is muscular writing from deep within the American heartland. Farmer's Almanac is full of unexpected tenderness when you were expecting brutality, and ready with all kinds of ructions whenever you think there might be routines. Chris Fink is the authentic voice of American agricultural labour. Watch out, latte-slurping salonnières, he's coming down the river and raising hell!"
—Giles Foden, author of The Last King of Scotland

From the Publisher