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Of related interest
A Memoir of Love, Death, and the Radio
With a new chapter and poems
T
ERRACE
B
OOKS
“Blending the spiritual and the profane, Feraca is beguiling.” —
Publishers Weekly
“An elegant yet muscular memoir, artistic in shape and beautiful in delivery.”
—Geeta Sharma-Jensen,
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Published September 2011
LC: 2007011786 PN 248 pp. 6 x 9
ISBN 978-0-299-28574-6 Paper $19.95 t ISBN 978-0-299-28573-9 e-book $9.99 t
“From the wife who discovers her husband
has a gay lover to the accordion player in a
polka band, Randolph gets each and every
character just right.”
—
Booklist
10
THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS
• SPRING 2012 •
Fiction / Great Plains
Stories
“Ladette Randolph’s stories sink their teeth into the deep
Nebraska Midwest the way that Flannery O’Connor tore
into the heart of Georgia. There’s a wonderfully sly, dead-
pan sweetness at work here, so that it may take a moment
to realize how odd and twisty the stories are.”
—Dan Chaon, author of
Await Your Reply
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, loneli-
ness 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 end-
ing 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.
“Ladette Randolph’s stories have the sly, subtle intensity of a snake
gliding through grass. They sneak up on their characters and the
reader alike, invoking humor, grace, and wisdom before pouncing on
us with exhilarating epiphanies that are as dark and brutal as they are
hopeful.”—Meghan Daum, author of
Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in
That House
is editor in chief of the
journal
Ploughshares
and teaches at Emerson
College in Boston. Winner of many awards
for her short stories and books, she is author
of a novel,
A Sandhills Ballad
, and editor of
two anthologies,
A Different Plain
and
The Big
Empty.
She was formerly the managing editor
of the journal
Prairie Schooner
and an acquir-
ing editor at University of Nebraska Press.
• 2005 cloth, UWP ISBN 978-0-299-21510-1
A trade imprint of the University of Wisconsin Press
Photo
credit: Tamra Turnbull
FIRST PAPERBACK EDITION
March 2012
LC: 2005005452 PS
292 pp. 5 x 8 1/2
Paper $24.95 t
ISBN 978-0-299-21514-9
e-book $12.95 t
ISBN 978-0-299-21513-2
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