Showing results by author "Bonnie Jo Campbell" in All Categories

On an island in the Great Massasauga Swamp—an area known as “The Waters” to the residents of nearby Whiteheart, Michigan—herbalist and eccentric Hermine “Herself” Zook has healed the local women of their ailments for generations. As stubborn as her tonics are powerful, Herself inspires reverence and fear in the people of Whiteheart, and even in her own three estranged daughters. The youngest—the beautiful, inscrutable, and lazy Rose Thorn—has left her own daughter, eleven-year-old Dorothy “Donkey” Zook, to grow up wild.

The fiction of Bonnie Jo Campbell has been honored with the Pushcart Prize, the AWP Award for Short Fiction, and Southern Review’s Eudora Welty Prize. In this stunning collection—a National Book Award finalist—Campbell’s rural Michigan characters are both as jagged as rusty metal and as delicate as the light brush of fading dreams.

Jim Lobretto has been awake for 24 hours, he’s out of gas, and he’s craving cigarettes. He’s irritable and eager to be home, so when he’s stopped by the police all he feels is annoyance. However, his next cigarette, the one he smokes while he’s waiting for the cop to get out of his car, will spark a traumatic accident and drag Jim into a chain of events which only promise unspeakable agony and pain.

Writer Bonnie Jo Campbell is friendly and likes to talk to everybody. She also believes in being neighborly. Sometimes she interviews writers and other bookish people at length; other times she talks to her nieces about kittens.