Though the best American writers live everywhere now, a popular fiction persists: our strongest literary voices are strictly bi-coastal ones. Barnstorm sets out to disprove that cliché and to undermine another one as well: the sense of regional fiction as something quaint, slightly regressive, and full of local color. The stories in this collection capture our global reality with a ruthless, unaffected voice. Lorrie Moore's "The Jewish Hunter" is a dark romance that's by turns cynical and guileless. Mack Friedman catches the smoking feel of first love in his "Setting the Lawn on Fire," and Jesse Lee Kercheval's "Brazil" is a raucous, ultimately mournful road trip. For Jane Hamilton, Wisconsin is a gorgeous but bittersweet homecoming, and for Kelly Cherry, in her achingly elegiac "As It Is in Heaven," it's the hopeful new world, juxtaposed with a bleak, tweedy England. Dwight Allen's "The Green Suit" evokes the young man edging toward adulthood, in a New York that's as flamboyant as an opera, and Tenaya Darlington, in her "A Patch of Skin," constructs a pure horror story, because the horror of loneliness is something we all know. Together Barnstorm's eclectic voices suggest that every coast now, even the Great Lakes' shores, are at the very center of our best, and truest, national literature.

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Raphael Kadushin is humanities editor at the University of Wisconsin Press, editor of Wonderlands: Good Gay Travel Writing, and a contributing editor at Bon Appétit magazine. He contributes to a wide range of publications—among them National Geographic, National Geographic Traveler, Condé Nast Traveler, Town & Country Travel, and Out Traveler—and his work appears in a variety of collections including Men on Men 5, Best Food Writing 2001, and Through the Lens: National Geographic Best Photographs.

“Anybody who follows the Wisconsin literary scene knows that we're unduly blessed when it comes to the number of quality literary writers within our borders. . . . But it's one thing to be aware of our good fortune and another to hold the evidence in our hands. . . . That [Barnstorm is] a strong collection is no surprise. But what is unexpected is how different the stories are from each other, and how most of them refuse to adhere to the common preconception of a ‘Wisconsin short story’. . . . This is a worthy collection of stories by any standard, highly recommended for those who want to tap into the talent living among us.”—The Capital Times, Madison, Wisconsin

“Barnstorm joins a growing number of important new books of fiction by Wisconsin authors . . . [that] emphatically reinforces the case that lots of good writing is coming out of Wisconsin right now. . . . [The stories in Barnstorm] are remarkable in their diversity.”—Isthmus