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Published Aug 2015
272 pages
Genre: Short Stories
Publication Information
A richly textured, diverse collection of stories that illuminate the heartland and America itself, exploring questions of history, race, and identity.
Grounded in place, spanning the Civil War to the present day, the stories in I Was a Revolutionary capture the roil of history through the eyes of an unforgettable cast of characters: the visionaries and dreamers, radical farmers and socialist journalists, quack doctors and protestors who haunt the past and present landscape of the state of Kansas.
In these stories - which have appeared in Zoetrope All-Story, The Best New American Voices, FiveChapters, Story, American Short Fiction, and Ninth Letter - the award-winning writer Andrew Malan Milward crafts an epic mosaic of the American experience, tracing how we live amid the inconvenient ghosts of history. "The Burning of Lawrence" vibrates with the raw terror of a town pillaged by pro-Confederate raiders. "O Death" recalls the desperately hard journey of the Exodusters - African-American migrants who came to Kansas to escape oppression in the South. And, in the collection's haunting title piece, a professor of Kansas history surveys his decades-long slide from radicalism to complacency, a shift that parallels the landscape around him.
Using his own home state as a prism through which to view both a nation's history and our own universal battles as individuals, Milward has created one of the freshest and most complex story collections in recent years.
"Starred Review. The eight stories in Milward's collection don't just use history as a jumping-off point, they also raise questions about the nature of recorded history. Each one feels as complete and complex as a novel. This collection is sharp, shrewd, and consistently thought provoking." - Publishers Weekly
"A few of the stories are strong and memorable, but elsewhere, Milward's narrative cleverness and structural experiments can get in the way of empathy for his characters." - Kirkus
"Imagine running a thumb across a stack of old sepia photographs and discovering that under the dust and grime of time these photos are actually vibrant, full-colored and intimate, revealing secrets about a place, people and country you thought you knew. This is a rare and powerful book." - Diane Cook, author of Man V. Nature
"The writing is always bold, the stakes are always high...I Was A Revolutionary recalls W. G. Sebald in its interweaving of historical memory and present concerns, and Aleksandar Hemon in its understanding that fragments can set off adventures." - Will Chancellor, author of A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall
"Not since Edward P. Jones have I encountered a writer who so brilliantly captures a specific place, imbuing it with new life and impressive nuance. A tremendous collection that I won't ever forget." - Molly Antopol, author of The UnAmericans
"Milward's collection is both political and a love song. Milward's aching ballads are about Kansas, in particular, but in their brilliant, kaleidoscopic view of history, they offer penetrating insight about America as a whole. Read this book." - Elliott Holt, author of You Are One of Them
"Andrew Malan Milward summons the history of his home state with grace, wit, and kaleidoscopic brilliance. These stories are haymakers, bloody and wild and just the thing we need to wake up and fight. Haunting and beautiful and required reading for anyone who cares about the soul of America." - Jim Gavin, author of Middle Men
This information about I Was a Revolutionary was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
A native of Lawrence, Kansas, Andrew Malan Milward is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He has served as a McCreight Fiction Fellow at the University of Wisconsin, a Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University, a Writing Fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and a Resident Artist at the Santa Fe Art Institute. His fiction has appeared in many places, including Zoetrope, The Southern Review, Columbia, Conjunctions, and Best New American Voices 2010. He lives in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where he is a Visiting Writer at the University of Southern Mississippi.
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