Beneath the Bonfire: Stories
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Nickolas Butler's debut novel, Shotgun Lovesongs, has become an international bestseller and won numerous accolades, including France's Prix PAGE/America. Now, in Beneath the Bonfire, he demonstrates his talent for portraying "a place and its people with such love that you'll find yourself falling for them, too" (Josh Weil, author of The Great Glass Sea).
Young couples gather to participate in an annual "chainsaw party," cutting down trees for firewood in anticipation of the winter. A group of men spend a weekend hunting for mushrooms in the wilderness where they grew up and where some still find themselves trapped. An aging environmentalist takes out his frustration and anger on a singular, unsuspecting target. One woman helps another get revenge against a man whose crime extends far beyond him to an entire community. Together, the ten stories in this dazzling, surprising collection evoke a landscape that will be instantly recognizable to anyone who has traveled the back roads and blue highways of America, and they completely capture the memorable characters who call it home.
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Nickolas Butler. (2015). Beneath the Bonfire: Stories. St. Martin's Publishing Group.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)Nickolas Butler. 2015. Beneath the Bonfire: Stories. St. Martin's Publishing Group.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)Nickolas Butler, Beneath the Bonfire: Stories. St. Martin's Publishing Group, 2015.
MLA Citation (style guide)Nickolas Butler. Beneath the Bonfire: Stories. St. Martin's Publishing Group, 2015.
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- bioText: NICKOLAS BUTLER was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and raised in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. His writings have appeared in: Narrative Magazine, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review Online, The Progressive, The Christian Science Monitor, and elsewhere. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin and the Iowa Writer's Workshop, he currently lives in Wisconsin with his wife and their two children. Shotgun Lovesongs is his first novel.
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Nickolas Butler's debut novel, Shotgun Lovesongs, has become an international bestseller and won numerous accolades, including France's Prix PAGE/America. Now, in Beneath the Bonfire, he demonstrates his talent for portraying "a place and its people with such love that you'll find yourself falling for them, too" (Josh Weil, author of The Great Glass Sea).
Young couples gather to participate in an annual "chainsaw party," cutting down trees for firewood in anticipation of the winter. A group of men spend a weekend hunting for mushrooms in the wilderness where they grew up and where some still find themselves trapped. An aging environmentalist takes out his frustration and anger on a singular, unsuspecting target. One woman helps another get revenge against a man whose crime extends far beyond him to an entire community. Together, the ten stories in this dazzling, surprising collection evoke a landscape that will be instantly recognizable to anyone who has traveled the back roads and blue highways of America, and they completely capture the memorable characters who call it home.- reviews
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- source: Peter Orner, author of Last Car over the Sagamore Bridge
- content:
"The stories in Beneath the Bonfire pack a sincere, emotional punch. Nickolas Butler's territory might be the Midwest (which warms this particular reader's heart), but the losses--and hard-won gains--are universal. This writer is the real deal."
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- source: Bill Cheng, author of Southern Cross the Dog
- content: "I love these stories: they're quiet, careful. As glaciated as their own vistas. Butler's is a deft hand, who as in the title story, takes us beneath the ice and forces us to confront the deepest extents of our friendships, our marriages, our family. Without a doubt, Beneath the Bonfire is a diamond of a collection, shaped and hardened through the profound geologic pressures of love and pain."
- premium: False
- source: Diane Cook, author of Man V. Nature
- content: "Beneath the Bonfire burns with nostalgia for those youthful years when we know too little and surrenders to the later years when we've learned too much. With honesty and tenderness, Butler portrays people at crossroads, as hardened and hopeful as the landscape they can't leave behind."
- premium: False
- source: Benjamin Percy, author of The Dead Lands, Red Moon, and The Wilding
- content: "Nickolas Butler's characters lust and cherish and sustain and betray and redeem and console, traveling through every chamber of the human heart, and it's hard to say -- based on these excellent stories -- whether love is the easiest or the most complicated emotion, but it's clearly the best."
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March 30, 2015
Though all 10 stories in Butler’s (Shotgun Lovesongs) new collection may be populated by restless, contemplative, and hardscrabble characters, it’s the sense of place (rural Wisconsin) and the natural world that’s grounding the events. In the unforgettable opener, “The Chainsaw Soiree,” a cherished recurring winter-solstice party ends up offering complicated betrayals and resentments among a group of friends and lovers. Trouble comes in a variety of forms for Butler’s characters: the stoner mushroom hunters in “Morels” must process a fatality and its damning consequences; a soft-hearted, newly laid-off diabetic and his adoring wife fret about the future in “Apples”; in the title story, a bonfire on a frozen lake sets the scene for two scuba divers with a complex, sex-addicted history of “feeding each other nothing but motion and sweat.” Some narratives have been gloriously expanded into fully molded works of art, while others are mere portraits, short yet no less poignant, such as “Rainwater,” in which a grandfather raises his grandson after his junkie mother disappears without a trace. Sensitive to the human condition, Butler continues to demonstrate his impressive command of atmosphere and humanity.
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April 1, 2015
These 10 succinct stories center on the subject of loss. There are the inevitable losses that life doles out, notably illness and death, and the losses caused by men's bad behavior or women's absence. Male bonds are severed to maintain lies in Sven and Lily and Morels, in which a longtime ritual must end after a deadly accident. Love affairs or marriages end frequently, including in the title story, in which scuba diving in a frozen lake near a bonfire of discarded Christmas trees has unintended consequences. Two of the longest stories also pack the biggest punch. In Sweet Light Crude, an old ecoterrorist who's dying of cancer makes an oil company CEO pay for the Gulf oil spill, and In Western Counties features a retired female police officer acknowledging mental loss who helps a younger woman recover from physical loss. The permeating sadness is relieved somewhat in the closing story, Apples, a sweet celebration of a marriage. From Butler (Shotgun Lovesongs, 2014), these are skillfully told, if overwhelmingly sad, pieces.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)
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December 1, 2014
After receiving some powerful reviews when it appeared last spring, Butler's Wisconsin-set, warmly small-town, big-friendship debut, Shotgun Lovesongs, went on to become a national best seller with a movie in the works. This follow-up collects ten stories. As a preview, "In Western Counties" will be released as an e-original on January 6, 2015.
Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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April 1, 2015
An aptly chosen Cormac McCarthy quote precedes Butler's story collection, chiefly set in rural Wisconsin and Minnesota and featuring characters who often fail to demonstrate "right" behavior. In "Sweet Light Crude," an oil spill leads to a battle of wills between an environmental activist and an oil executive. "In Western Counties" features a dog-fighting ring, an abused girlfriend, and a retired police officer with early signs of Alzheimer's. The final tale, "Apples," about an older man laid off from his job and feeling useless without work, has an uncharacteristically upbeat ending. As he demonstrated in Shotgun Lovesongs, Butler has a gift for depicting the bonds and emotional depth of male friendship without crossing over into sentimentality. Even those characters with conventional, well-paying jobs and stable relationships seem only to unlock their true, feral nature when drinking and smoking weed with their buddies, with sometimes tragic consequences. Women often appear as a civilizing influence, the wild Sunny in "Train People Move Slow" a notable exception. VERDICT The frankly masculine point of view brings to mind Jim Harrison along with McCarthy; the book should appeal to adventurous readers interested in that perspective, and it will attract regional interest as well. [See Prepub Alert, 11/10/14.]--Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis
Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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Nickolas Butler's debut novel, Shotgun Lovesongs, has become an international bestseller and won numerous accolades, including France's Prix PAGE/America. Now, in Beneath the Bonfire, he demonstrates his talent for portraying "a place and its people with such love that you'll find yourself falling for them, too" (Josh Weil, author of The Great Glass Sea).
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