O Cornhuskers! 25+ books of Nebraska fiction
Explore the best Nebraska fiction with 'O Cornhuskers!'—a curated list of 25+ books celebrating Cornhusker State stories, authors, and Midwest charm. Discover your next read today!
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One of Ours
by Willa Cather
Willa Cather's Pulitzer Prize-winning narrative of the making of a young American soldier. Claude Wheeler, the sensitive, aspiring protagonist of this beautifully modulated novel, resembles the youngest son of a peculiarly American fairy tale. His fortune is ready-made for him, but he refuses to settle for it. Alienated from his crass father and pious mother, all but rejected by a wife who reserves her ardor for missionary work, and dissatisfied with farming, Claude is an idealist without an ideal to cling to. It is only when his country enters the First World War that Claude finds what he has been searching for all his life. In One of Ours Willa Cather explores the destiny of a grandchild of the pioneers, a young Nebraskan whose yearnings impel him toward a frontier bloodier and more distant than the one that vanished before his birth. In doing so, she creates a canny and extraordinarily vital portrait of an American psyche at once skeptical and romantic, restless and heroic.
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Ceremony in Lone Tree
by Wright Morris
Although Tom Scanlon would just as soon spend it alone, his ninetieth birthday becomes the occasion for a family gathering in the Midwestern town of Lone Tree. The unlikely celebrants take this opportunity to reconceive their visions of past, future, and family in their own grotesque and ultimately liberating ways. Ceremony in Lone Tree is a spare and beautiful work by one of America's great postwar authors.
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The Horsecatcher
by Mari Sandoz
Unable to kill, a young Cheyenne is scorned by his tribe when he chooses to become a horse catcher rather than a warrior.
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A White Bird Flying
by Bess Streeter Aldrich
Abbie Deal, the matriarch of a pioneer Nebraska family, has died at the beginning of A White Bird Flying, leaving her china and heavy furniture to others and to her granddaughter Laura the secret of her dream of finer things. Grandma Deal's literary aspirations had been thwarted by the hard circumstances of her life, but Laura vows that nothing, no one, will deter her from a successful writing career. Childhood passes, and the more she repeats her vow the more life intervenes.
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Goodnight, Nebraska
by Tom McNeal
At the age of 17, Randall Hunsacker shoots his mother's boyfriend, steals a car and comes close to killing himself. His second chance lies in a small Nebraska farm town, where the landmarks include McKibben's Mobil Station, Frmka's Superette, and a sign that says The Wages of Sin is Hell. This is Goodnight, a place so ingrown and provincial that Randall calls it "Sludgeville"-until he starts thinking of it as home. In this pitch-perfect novel, Tom McNeal explores the currents of hope, passion, and cruelty beneath the surface of the American heartland. In Randall, McNeal creates an outcast whose redemption lies in Goodnight, a strange, small, but ultimately embracing community where Randall will inspire fear and adulation, win the love of a beautiful girl and nearly throw it all away.
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Strange Angels
by Jonis Agee
Strange Angels tells the story of three siblings thrown together by the death of their father, Heywood Bennett. Forced to manage his sprawling prairie empire together, the Bennett children must find a way to get along despite their longstanding rivalries.A New york Times Notable Book, Strange Angels is a mesmerizing evocation of the contemporary American West.
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Among the Missing
by Dan Chaon
Focusing on the condition of the modern family, a thematically linked collection of short fiction captures the lives, dreams, and fates of men, women, and children who live outside of the American Dream.
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Troublemakers
by John McNally
Stories express the everyday aches and common cruelties of life that people endure and witness, from a wife stranding her husband on a roof, to a man sawing his kitchen into little pieces, to a man taking out his anger on a dead deer.
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The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters
by Timothy Schaffert
Lily and Mabel struggle to come to terms with their father's suicide as well as their mother's abandonment years earlier.
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Night Sounds and Other Stories
by Karen Gettert Shoemaker
These stories capture the small moments in life, a passing glance of a child's smile, the night sounds of crickets or clocks, and celebrates them, showing the importance of the preciousness of life, in whatever form it takes.
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The Ancient Memory & Other Stories
by John Gneisenau Neihardt
Death-defying and vulnerable fur-traders and Indians, demi-devils and almost-angels, and other complex personalities come fully to life in The Ancient Memory, which completes the collecting of John G. Neihardt's early short fiction begun with The End of the Dream and Other Stories. Originally published in popular magazines between 1905 and 1908, these stories about the American frontier illustrated Neihardt's artistry in the short form and foreshadow the themes, situations, and characterizations of his later, better-known work. Although two of the Indian stories, the ironic "Feather for Feather" and the satirical "A Political Coup at Little Omaha," were collected in The Lonesome Trail in 1907, none has been reprinted since early in the twentieth century. Other stories included here are "Like a Woman," featuring the plucky Pelagie, and "The Face in the Balcony," which is dedicated to "those who have gone through life misunderstood." "The Epic-Minded Scot," about a stranger who is stubbornly idealistic and scrupulous, is considered one of Neihardt's best tales. "The Brutal Fact" revolves around a William Tell type of contest between trapping partners that anticipates Neihardt's Song of Three Friends. "The Lure of Woman," a study of greed and revenge, was expanded into his novel Life's Lure. The ineffable "Ancient Memory" carries profound philosophical implications while presenting a strange doppelgänger of sorts. Finally, the memorable Waters—an alcoholic, one-legged, one-eyed frontier printer—is introduced in "The Discarded Fetish," which, with minor changes, became the first half of the novel The Dawn-Builder. In her foreword Neihardt's daughter Hilda Neihardt recalls intimate details incidental to the writing of these stories.
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The Getaway, and Other Stories
by Dorothy Thomas
Hard-hitting and humorous, these twelve short stories challenge convention and stereotypes about country folk living in Western Nebraska. Original.
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Isn't It Romantic?
by Ron Hansen
Once again, acclaimed novelist Ron Hansen demonstrates his masterful versatility as a writer, with Isn't It Romantic?, a screwball comedy in the tradition of filmmaker Preston Sturges. In this charming entertainment, mistaken identities, botched schemes, and hilarious misunderstandings all play a part as Parisian sophistication collides with the affability and simple pleasures of the Great Plains. Touring America was Natalie's idea. But she had not planned on being accompanied on a cross-country bus by her playboy fiancé, Pierre. Nor had they anticipated being stranded in Seldom, Nebraska, population 395. But that is exactly what happens to this French couple, and they quickly find themselves being taken in by the obliging citizens of Seldom: Natalie by Mrs. Christiansen, a retired high school teacher who runs a rooming house for women, and Pierre by Owen, a gas station owner and ambitious winemaker in an unlikely part of the world. And here also, the separated couple become enchanted by the locals. Natalie is soon being wooed by Dick Tupper, a handsome and honest rancher with a rambling farmhouse and lots of wide open space. Pierre falls quickly for Iona, a beautiful, no-nonsense waitress in the local diner. Soon everyone is hatching plots to get what they want: Owen needs help from Pierre's world-class wine business if he is ever going to sell his Nebraska vintage; Pierre wants Iona; Natalie thinks she wants Dick Tupper, but maybe it's Dick who wants Iona, and Natalie who wants Pierre? The fun and surprises are many in this playful romance.
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Mari
by Jane Valentine Barker
A fictionalized biography of the Nebraskan writer, Mari Sandoz (1866-1966), one of the first to show sympathy for the Indians. It describes her struggle to overcome her father's opposition to her ambition to be a writer.
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A Different Plain
by Ladette Randolph
In this collection of contemporary short stories, Nebraska writers explore the Midwest, covering topics such as small towns, desolate western lives, and comic families in tales by Richard Dooling, Kent Haruf, Ron Hansen, Jonis Agee, Dan Chaon, Marly Swick, Lisa Sandlin, Paul Eggers, and others. Simultaneous.
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The Road Home
by Jim Harrison
The Road Home lies in the shadows of Manifest Destiny and Wounded Knee; it is etched into the landscape of an old man's memory and into the stubborn dreams of a young man's heart. In one of Jim Harrison’s greatest works, five members of the Northridge family narrate the tangled epic of their history on the expanses of the Nebraska plains. They strive to understand their fates, to reconcile with demons of the past, to live in accordance with the land and to die with grace. As the family grapples with the mysterious forces that both pull them apart and draw them inextricably back together, they must come to term with life's greatest and hardest lessons: the deception of passion, the pain of love, the vitality of art, and the supplication to nature's generosity and fury.
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Three Versions of the Truth
by Amy Knox Brown
"The duplicitous nature of relationships--with lovers, family, friends, but most importantly, with one's own inner demons--is explored in all its tangled perplexity ... in stories set in Nebraska"--Page 4 of cover.
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Outside Valentine
by Liza Ward
Haunted by the serial murders committed by Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate years earlier, Manhattan collector of antiquities Lowell finds the case further complicated by a self-appointed teen detective.
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The Jugger
by Richard Stark
Elderly Joe Sheer, a former safecracker, is murdered, but before he dies, he is forced to implicate Parker in some very shady dealings that could mean Parker's own funeral. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.
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The Hangman's Knot
by David Wiltse
It's the hottest summer ever in Falls City, Nebraska. Acting deputy Billy Tree is struggling to readjust to his old hometown as well as recover from the shattering tragedy that ended his Secret Service career. But amid the shimmering heat, deserted barns, and burning plains, a horrifying, decades-old injustice is about to rear its ugly head when a stranger with a vendetta arrives, hell-bent on making Falls City pay for its sins... It all begins for Billy when sinister miniature nooses arrive in his mail. And it soon escalates when deadly shots ring out in the night. Hot on the trail of a relentless killer, Billy discovers a viper's nest of secrets and lies that turns everything he thought he knew about his own family and the woman he loves into terrifying doubt-and renews the deep hatred that still festers beneath Falls City's rural peace...
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The Mystery of Hunting's End
by Mignon Good Eberhart
The Sand Hills of Nebraska, where Mignon Eberhart lived as a newlywed, inspired the setting of this 1930 chiller. In the middle of the bleak landscape sits the lodge called Hunting's End--where a young socialite (a.k.a. Nurse Keate) is determined to discover who killed her father five years earlier. Eberhart died in 1996 at age 97, after a long career as an award-winning mystery writer.
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The Floor of the Sky
by Pamela Carter Joern
The inner worlds of characters isolated by geography and habit are revealed in a novel, set in the Nebraska Sandhills, about an aging widow on the verge of losing her family's ranch and her sixteen-year old pregnant granddaughter who visits her for the summer. Original.
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The Cleanup
by Sean Doolittle
Matthew Worth is a mess. Somewhere between a good cop and a bad screwup, he botched a marriage and a career. His fellow officers think he’s a joke. His commanders are tired of cutting him breaks. Even his wife has left him for a flashy homicide detective. Busted to night patrol at a robbery-prone Omaha supermarket, Worth is doing time, wearing his uniform and asking shoppers if they want paper or plastic. If that isn’t enough, he suspects he might be falling for Gwen, the shy checkout girl who may be an even bigger mess than he is. It couldn’t get any worse. Until it does. When Gwen comes to him one night scared and desperate for help, Worth discovers just how far he’s willing to go to protect and serve. The next thing he knows, he’s driving a stolen car with a corpse in the trunk, a pistol in the glove box, and no way to turn back. Everything he doesn’t know could get them killed. And things haven’t even begun to get messy yet....
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This Is Not the Tropics
by Ladette Randolph
The stories collected in This Is Not the Tropics come from the geographic center of a divided nation, and its protagonists evoke a split personality—one half submerged in America’s own diehard mythology, the other half searching to escape tradition. Together they form a portrait of the Plains that is both quirky and poignant. While the themes in this collection are familiar—love and betrayal, loneliness and regret, the needs of the individual versus the needs of the community—the tales themselves are startling and new. Whether it is the story of an eccentric out-of-work accordion player; a woman ending a long marriage against the backdrop of a visit from her failing mother; a young girl who wishes to solve a mystery until real mystery enters her life; or all of the men in a small Nebraska town who annually compete in a hilariously earnest beauty pageant, these are tales that speak of the lives lived in the small towns, the prairie cities, and on the dirt roads off blue highways in the middle of nowhere and everywhere.