Synopses & Reviews
In Chris Finks debut work of fiction, Americas rural core is cracked open to reveal moments of stark beauty and cruelty. Farmers Almanac—a new Midwestern Gothic—is an imaginary handbook for rural living, as timeless and essential as its namesake. But this is no American pastoral. Finks vision is more Orwell than Rockwell. Not since Winesburg, Ohio has a book so thoroughly plumbed the Midwestern character. A despairing farmer milks a dead cow, a baseball phenom chooses between the diamond and the dairy barn, and in the back of the school bus, a young girl fights back against her tormentors. Farmers Almanac reports the news from mythical Odette County, Wisconsin, where the milk prices keep falling, and the forecast is not good.
Review
"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
"Farmers Almanac is one of the most evocative collections Ive 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
About the Author
Chris Fink is a professor at Beloit College in Wisconsin, where he is editor of the
Beloit Fiction Journal.