Laird Hunt is the author of eight novels, a collection of stories, and two book-length translations from the French. He has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and won the Anisfield--Wolf Award for Fiction, the Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine, and Italy's Bridge prize. His reviews and essays have been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and many others. He teaches in the Department of Literary Arts at Brown University and lives in Providence.

A virtuosic portrait of midcentury America itself - physically stalwart, unerringly generous, hopeful that tragedy can be mitigated through faith in land and neighbor alike...This is not fiction as literary uproar. This is a refined realism of the sort Flaubert himself championed, storytelling that accrues detail by lean detail...Hunt's prose is galvanized by powerful questions. Who were those forebears who tilled the land for decades, seemingly without complaint? How did they fashion happiness, or manage soaring passions, in their conformist communities? He re-examines the pastoral with ardent precision...What Hunt ultimately gives us is a pure and shining book, an America where community becomes a 'symphony of souls, ' a sustenance greater than romance or material wealth for those wise enough to join in

Laird Hunt is the author of eight novels, a collection of stories, and two book-length translations from the French. He has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and won the Anisfield--Wolf Award for Fiction, the Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine, and Italy's Bridge prize. His reviews and essays have been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and many others. He teaches in the Department of Literary Arts at Brown University and lives in Providence.

A virtuosic portrait of midcentury America itself - physically stalwart, unerringly generous, hopeful that tragedy can be mitigated through faith in land and neighbor alike...This is not fiction as literary uproar. This is a refined realism of the sort Flaubert himself championed, storytelling that accrues detail by lean detail...Hunt's prose is galvanized by powerful questions. Who were those forebears who tilled the land for decades, seemingly without complaint? How did they fashion happiness, or manage soaring passions, in their conformist communities? He re-examines the pastoral with ardent precision...What Hunt ultimately gives us is a pure and shining book, an America where community becomes a 'symphony of souls, ' a sustenance greater than romance or material wealth for those wise enough to join in

Laird Hunt is the author of eight novels, a collection of stories, and two book-length translations from the French. He has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and won the Anisfield--Wolf Award for Fiction, the Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine, and Italy's Bridge prize. His reviews and essays have been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and many others. He teaches in the Department of Literary Arts at Brown University and lives in Providence.

A virtuosic portrait of midcentury America itself - physically stalwart, unerringly generous, hopeful that tragedy can be mitigated through faith in land and neighbor alike...This is not fiction as literary uproar. This is a refined realism of the sort Flaubert himself championed, storytelling that accrues detail by lean detail...Hunt's prose is galvanized by powerful questions. Who were those forebears who tilled the land for decades, seemingly without complaint? How did they fashion happiness, or manage soaring passions, in their conformist communities? He re-examines the pastoral with ardent precision...What Hunt ultimately gives us is a pure and shining book, an America where community becomes a 'symphony of souls, ' a sustenance greater than romance or material wealth for those wise enough to join in