Half Wild

by Robin MacArthur

Overview

“This heartbreakingly honest and authentic fiction will make you weep over, laugh at, and finally cheer for, mothers and daughters, sons and fathers, lovers and losers, and the human race in general. Half Wild is American fiction, and American literature, at its very best.”—Howard Frank Mosher, author of The Great Northern Express and Northern Borders

Spanning nearly forty years, the stories in Robin MacArthur’s formidable debut give voice to the dreams, hungers, and fears of a diverse cast of Vermonters—adolescent girls, aging hippies, hardscrabble farmers, disconnected women, and solitary men. Straddling the border between civilization and the wild, they all struggle to make sense of their loneliness and longings in the stark and often isolating enclaves they call home—golden fields and white-veiled woods, dilapidated farmhouses and makeshift trailers, icy rivers and still lakes rouse the imagination, tether the heart, and inhabit the soul.

In “Creek Dippers,” a teenage girl vows to escape the fate that has trapped her eccentric mother. In “God’s Country,” an elderly woman is unexpectedly reminded of a forbidden youthful passion and the chance she did not take. Returning to her childhood house when her mother falls ill, a daughter grapples with her own sense of belonging in “The Women Where I’m From.”

With striking prose powerful in its clarity and purity, MacArthur effortlessly renders characters—men and women, young and old—cleaved to the fierce and beautiful land that has defined them.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062444417
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	12/15/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	229
Sales rank:	271,147
File size:	884 KB

About the Author

Robin MacArthur lives and works on the farm where she was born in Vermont. She is the author of Half Wild: Stories (winner of the 2017 PEN/New England Award), the editor of Contemporary Vermont Fiction: An Anthology, and one-half of the indie-folk duo Red Heart the Ticker.

Editorial Reviews

06/13/2016
With lush and loving attention to detail, MacArthur’s collection of 11 stories covers 40 years of life in rural Vermont. In “Maggie in the Trees,” a man looks back on a romance with a troubled, passionate woman, who also happens to be married to his best friend. In “Karmann,” perhaps the most memorable story, a teenager is in love with her best friend’s older brother, who is deployed in Vietnam. In “The Women Where I’m From,” a woman returns to her hometown to care for a sick mother and reunites tentatively with old friends. Loneliness, lost loves, dilapidated trailers, parties littered with empty beer cans, and women running through the woods all feature prominently throughout the book. Though the protagonists in each story are certainly different—hippies, farmers, young girls, old women—they can tend to blur together. Still, MacArthur is able to render complicated situations precisely and depict tenderness and harshness with an equally deft hand. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

Move over Annie Proulx, Raymond Carver, and Flannery O’Connor. Make room for Vermont’s own Robin MacArthur. Half Wild is American fiction, and American literature, at its very best.” — Howard Frank Mosher, author of Where the Rivers Flow North and God's Kingdom

“MacArthur writes with the ear of a musician and a classic, pure command of the short story form, like a dispatch from Eudora Welty in the great north woods.” — Megan Mayhew Bergman, author of Birds of a Lesser Paradise and Almost Famous Women

“Half Wild... made me feel a bittersweet nostalgia for all the possible lives I could have led. This is a beautiful and emotionally rich book and it casts a big spell.” — Diane Cook, author of Man V. Nature

“Feral, wise, deft, elegant, luminous, Robin MacArthur’s stories inhabit a reader with shimmering wonder.” — Rick Bass, author of All The Land to Hold Us

“Robin MacArthur is a striking new voice and Half Wild is a stormy marvel of a debut.” — Laura van den Berg, author of Find Me and The Isle of Youth

“MacArthur is able to render complicated situations precisely and depict tenderness and harshness with an equally deft hand.” — Publishers Weekly

“MacArthur’s multilayered tales involve heady internalization as characters push beyond their preoccupations to inch toward resolution.” — Booklist

“Each powerful story in this collection becomes part of a fearsome whole, one that celebrates the ways in which memory itself is half wild.” — Ploughshares (online)

From the Publisher

MacArthur’s multilayered tales involve heady internalization as characters push beyond their preoccupations to inch toward resolution.

Booklist

Each powerful story in this collection becomes part of a fearsome whole, one that celebrates the ways in which memory itself is half wild.

Ploughshares (online)

Half Wild... made me feel a bittersweet nostalgia for all the possible lives I could have led. This is a beautiful and emotionally rich book and it casts a big spell.

Diane Cook

Feral, wise, deft, elegant, luminous, Robin MacArthur’s stories inhabit a reader with shimmering wonder.

Rick Bass

Move over Annie Proulx, Raymond Carver, and Flannery O’Connor. Make room for Vermont’s own Robin MacArthur. Half Wild is American fiction, and American literature, at its very best.

Howard Frank Mosher

MacArthur writes with the ear of a musician and a classic, pure command of the short story form, like a dispatch from Eudora Welty in the great north woods.

Megan Mayhew Bergman

Robin MacArthur is a striking new voice and Half Wild is a stormy marvel of a debut.

Laura van den Berg

MacArthur’s multilayered tales involve heady internalization as characters push beyond their preoccupations to inch toward resolution.

Booklist

★ 09/01/2016
In MacArthur's polished debut, the women generally want up from the backwoods, even if their mothers have settled in and the men around them cling to forest and field from conviction or perhaps stasis and fear. Angel, who both loves and hates her hard-drinking mother, sees the fields stretching outward and thinks of walking. Katie, whose mom dreamed of being a poet in college but can't persuade her husband to bring in electricity, is just starting to rebel. After miscarriages and a wild affair with her husband's best friend, Maggie really does leave. So does Sally, saddened that her shiny new ways irritate her father and that she'll lose his "wild and unsettling hunger to go deeper, and deeper yet into the heart of the woods." But things don't get too sentimental; Cora is aghast at her sweet grandson's easy racism. VERDICT Complex and eminently satisfying stories of rural life; for all readers.

Library Journal

2016-05-17
Rural Vermonters are eager to cut loose from the responsibilities of work, family, and community in this debut story collection.As the title suggests, MacArthur specializes in men and women who are trying to access an inner ferality. Sometimes they act out in nature, as in "Creek Dippers," in which a mother and daughter go skinny-dipping, or "Maggie in the Trees," narrated by a man who conducts an affair with a married woman in a cabin in the woods. The lightly linked stories all take place in a fecund, unpaved region of the state that seems to sanction bad behavior: "God's Country" is written from the perspective of an elderly woman whose grandson is using her falling-down barn as a meeting place for a white-power group. Many of the conflicts are more interior, though, as is the case with the narrator of "The Heart of the Woods," who married a wealthy real estate developer but comes from lower-class logging stock: "How many years will I have to walk this line—trying to prove myself in both worlds I belong to?" In the best-turned story, the concluding "The Women Where I'm From," MacArthur captures the subtle and irresistible pull of place as the narrator returns home from Seattle to care for her ailing mother. ("What is it, this tether?") Lacking many options, women tend to lapse into bad relationships. Meanwhile, 10 join the military to meet their fates in Vietnam or the Middle East; the young mother of "The Long Road Turns to Joy" finds her Buddhist calm challenged by her son's decision to enlist. MacArthur writes about all this with intellectual force and grace, though also with an evenhandedness that doesn't always match the subject matter—one wishes for a little more wildness in the prose. But she's mapping unexplored territory. A promising debut and admirable survey of adolescent and middle-aged crises in rough country.

Kirkus Reviews