Böcker av Michael Martone

"In Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana, Michael Martone places steady fingers on the arrhythmic pulse of the Flyover as he conjures Winesburg, Indiana, a fictional town and all of its inhabitants' lyric philosophies, tales of the mundane, and the sensation of being "lost" in the heart of the heart of the country. But here, in over one-hundred and thirty short fictions, even as there is much sadness, the citizens continue to tinker and create, marvel and wonder in the midst of ruin and rust. These stories may capture lives of quiet desperation, but in so doing, they create a kind of hobbled poetry in the spontaneous sketches of the ordinary made extraordinary, the regular irregularities, the familiar knocked off-balance with a glancing blow. From the overly overworked City Manager, to Margaret Wigg's obsessively collected collection of library stamps, to Blanche's air-filled aluminum ice cube tray, the town is a community of everyday odd-balls rife with isolation and idiosyncrasy. They are people trying to get by; that question loss as well as passion, devotedness, childhood wonder, and kinship in their observations and daily routines. With undeniable humor, intelligent quirk, and earnest longing for a pastoral passing into the annals of deep Midwestern time, Michael Martone crafts an unforgettable panoply of characters whose perspectives invite us to alternatively interpret our own commonplaces"--

Fictitious biographical snippets that celebrate the sky-written words of early aviation and the life of the man behind them.

This collection of more than twenty-five essays, both meditative and formally inventive, considers all kinds of subjects: everyday objects such as keys and hats, plus concepts of time and place; the memoir; writing; the essay itself; and Michael Martone's friendship with the writers David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, and Kurt Vonnegut.

Describes how the author's mother, as the dean of girls at a high school in Fort Wayne, Indiana, ""constructed a nostalgic past out of nothing.

A playfully contrarian take on the teaching and learning of creative writing. The pieces are drawn from a career spent loosening the creative strictures on writing. Including articles, public addresses, essays, interviews, and an eulogy, these writings vary in form but are unified in addressing the technical and artistic issues that face writers.

Places like Martone's hometown of Fort Wayne, as well as Peru, Elkhart, and Indianapolis, and narrators such as Colonel Sanders, Alfred Kinsey, and James Dean's high school English teacher all come to life with the author's trademark blend of irreverent humor and incisive reality.