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Your next favorite book
is waiting.
Laird Hunt's masterful story collection capturing one summer's day in the Indiana community where the beloved National Book Award Finalist Zorrie bloomed.
Candy Wilson has forgotten to buy the paprika. Turner Davis needs to get his zinnias in. Della Dorner told her mother she was going to the Galaxy Swirl, but that's not where she's really headed on her new Schwinn five-speed.
Float Up, Sing Down is the story of a single day. But in that day, how much teeming life! The residents of this rural town have their routines, their preferences, their joys, grudges, and regrets. Gossip is paramount. Lives are entwined. Retired sheriffs climb corn bins and muse on lost love, French teachers throw firecrackers out of barn windows, and teenagers borrow motorcycles to ride the back roads.
Each of the fourteen stories of Float Up, Sing Down follows one character's day in the life in one of Hunt's most beloved and enduring landscapes. In the tradition of Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, Elizabeth Strout, and Edward P. Jones, this is a symphony of souls, a masterful portrait of both loneliness and community by one of our great limners of American experience.
"An entertaining work of exceptional vitality." ―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"The connective tissue of the stories, each of which is titled after its protagonist, is the characters' Indiana hamlet, friendly on the surface but riven with subterranean traumas ... Fans of Hunt's previous small-town studies will appreciate these lovingly drawn portraits." ―Publishers Weekly
"While the stories work as stand-alone pieces, they also form a beautiful whole. This is a loving portrait of small-town Middle America that resonates well beyond its borders." —Library Journal
"An ingeniously structured depiction of small-town life in rural Indiana, Float Up, Sing Down dignifies the ordinary people at the center of its stories, illuminating their secrets and desires in gently comedic ways that manage, too, to pierce us. Reminiscent of Joan Silber's work, this is a hopeful and poignant portrait of the intertwined lives that make a community. A miraculous puzzle of a collection." ―Cara Blue Adams, author of You Never Get It Back
"What a delight to spend a day with the inhabitants of Bright Creek, their longings and lusts, their memories. Laird Hunt writes so brilliantly about the quotidian-why a woman would leave a tin of paprika on a gravestone; why a boy would be devoted to this headband-and in doing so, he reveals so much else. Float Up, Sing Down is a shimmering, magical book." ―Margot Livesey, author of The Boy In the Field
"One of Laird Hunt's many gifts is his ability to transport readers to small towns filled with the most fascinating, yet ordinary, characters. He has done it again in this brilliant collection, which is skillfully linked by time and place. In the pages of Float Up, Sing Down, you'll meet a retired farmer closely observing his neighbors while thinking back on war days, a woman who finds great comfort in spending time in a cornfield, and a host of other complex and memorable people. I love this book." ―De'Shawn Charles Winslow, author of Decent People and In West Mills
"In Float Up, Sing Down, Hunt offers us access to the deepest secrets of the members of a small twentieth-century community in rural Indiana, showing the glory of the quotidian and allowing us to revel in the rare and spectacular cadences of inward narration as characters' minds race ahead of events and conversations while also zipping back and up and down and around. A sweet, sensitive, subtle masterpiece." ―Jennifer Croft, author of Homesick
This information about Float Up, Sing Down 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.
Laird Hunt's most recent novel, Zorrie, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Hunt 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 Award. He teaches in the Department of Literary Arts at Brown University and lives in Providence.
If you liked Float Up, Sing Down, try these:
by Laird Hunt
Published 2022
"It was Indiana, it was the dirt she had bloomed up out of, it was who she was, what she felt, how she thought, what she knew."
by Jackie Polzin
Published 2022
An exquisite new literary voice - wryly funny, nakedly honest, beautifully observational, in the vein of Jenny Offill and Elizabeth Strout - depicts one woman's attempt to keep her four chickens alive while reflecting on a recent loss.
by C. Morgan Babst
Published 2018
A dazzling debut about family, home, and grief.
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Two ambitious writers in 1960s LA face betrayal when one writes a novel based on the other's life.
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