Synopses & Reviews
Fiction. In his new story collection, WHERE WE ARE NOW, Robert Day brings new life to rural Western Kansas. Most of the stories are set in the fictional town of Bly, Kansas, and chronicle the daily life through a diverse set of perspectives ranging from a Russian-nuclear-attack fearing grandmother to a handyman who hunts for skulls along the Whitewoman River. Day closes the book with a story about a Kansan man living for a time in rural France. As Day writes in his preface, "The reason my muse and I like first person stories is because together we can be more than ourselves as we tell them. It is as if we are creating a talking family, some of us from one generation and some from another, some adopted, some of dubious parentage."
About the Author
Robert Day's short fiction has received Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prize citations. Among his awards and fellowships are National Endowment to the Arts, both Yaddo, and McDowell Fellowships, a Maryland Arts Council Award. His fiction has appeared in such places as TriQuarterly, North Dakota Quarterly, and New Letters, and his nonfiction has appeared in The American Scholar, Washington Post Magazine, Smithsonian, and elsewhere. He is the author of the novel The Last Cattle Drive, a Book-of-the- Month Club selection, two novellas, In My Stead and The Four Wheel Drive Quartet, and Speaking French in Kansas, a collection of short stories. He has taught at the Iowa Writers Workshop; University of Kansas; and Montaigne College, University of Bordeaux. He is past president of the Associated Writing Programs; the founder and former director of the Rose O'Neill Literary House; and founder and publisher of the Literary House Press at Washington College where he is an adjunct professor of English literature.