Nebraska: Stories
by Ron Hansen
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Stories of the heartland by the National Book Award finalist and author of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford."Nebraska captures a rowdy, changing America. Written with wit and brawny lyricism, in voices ranging from hip to tender, the stories gathered here are as diverse and expansive as the country they celebrate...References to America's heartland abound throughout the book and serve as a central metaphor for what's close to American hearts, what connects us: show more dreams, myths and possibilities as vast as the Great Plains. Wise and smart-alecky, creaking with legend and crackling with modernisms, these tales are about American obsessions past and present." –The Washington Post Book World
"Just as Raymond Carver came to be identified with a Pacific Northwest populated by blue-collar workers, and just as Richard Ford has crafted a Montana full of drifters, so Ron Hansen has carved out his own geographical niche. His Nebraska is a distinctive mix of 19th century settlers and 1980s breadwinners, of sudden storms and life-long yearnings, of lost souls stranded in the middle of nowhere." –USA Today
"Beautifully crafted stories... Wickedness, evil, malice is called by name; and for Hansen's people the snake in the garden never fails to appear." —The New York Times
"Breathtaking virtuosity...These short narratives are utterly clean and smooth; they click together like a collection of river-washed stones that are each remarkably different yet polished by the same hand."—Publishers Weekly
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Magnificent collection of short fiction by an American master. Hansen even dares offer readers a sequel to Hemingway's classic tale, "The Killers" and carries it off brilliantly.
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Author Information

25+ Works 4,665 Members
Ron Hansen was born in Omaha Nebraska in 1947.He received a BA degree in English from Creighton University in Nebraska in 1970. He is the author of more than 20 books, stories, and anthologies. He received the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters for his book Nebraska, a collection of short fiction, in show more 1989. Some of his other works include Mariette in Ecstasy; the children's book, The Shadowmaker; Desperadoes; the Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, which won the John Edgar Wideman Award in 1984; and the novel Atticus, a suspenseful murder mystery detailing a father's fierce love for his son. Atticus was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1996. Among the anthologies written by Hansen are The Sun So Hot I Froze To Death, Can I Just Sit Here For A While?, and True Romance. His short stories, with titles ranging from "His Dog" to "Playland," have appeared in the Stanford Alumni Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, the Iowa Review, Esquire, and many others. Besides holding Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, Hansen has received a Lyndhurst Foundation Grant and is a fellow of the University of Michigan Society of Fellows. Hansen has also held the position of Gerald Manley Hopkins S.J. Professor of Arts and Humanities at Santa Clara University. In May 2006 he was inducted into the College of Fellows at Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology. Also in that year The Assasination of Jesse James was adapted for the screen. In 2009 Mariette In Ecstasy was adapted for the stage at Lifetime Theater in Chicago. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Common Knowledge
- Original publication date
- 1989
- Important places
- USA; Nebraska, USA
- First words
- At the end of the nineteenth century a girl from Delaware got on a milk train in Omaha and took a green wool seat in the second-class car.
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)She stops when the Union Pacific passes, then picks a cigarette out of a pack of Kools and smokes it on the back porch, smelling air as crisp as Oxydol, looking up at the stars the Pawnee Indians looked at, hearing the low harmonica of big rigs on the highway in the town she knows like the palm of her hand, in the country she knows by heart.
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- Members
- 121
- Popularity
- 268,513
- Reviews
- 2
- Rating
- (3.77)
- Languages
- English, French
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 5
- ASINs
- 2

























































