Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
Kent Haruf’s honors include a Whiting Foundation Award and a special citation from the PEN/Hemingway Foundation. His 1999 novel, Plainsong, won the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the New Yorker Book Award; and Benediction (2013) was on the shortlist for the 2014 Folio Prize.
He lived with his wife, Cathy, in his native Colorado until his death in November 2014 at the age of 71. His last novel, Our Souls at Night, published in May 2015. Gary Fisketjon, his editor at Knopf, said "Kent had finished all his revisions and even gone through the copy editing."
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This is from your frontispiece: Plainsong--the unisonous vocal music used
in the Christian church from the earliest times; any simple and unadorned melody
or air.
There's an obvious pun that this is kind of a song or an emblem for the Plains
or an anthem for the Plains. Sung in a plain style. These are regular, ordinary
sort of elemental characters and I think they're presented sort of directly and
I wanted the prose to be kind of simple and direct.
Even without elaboration the characters are very strong. They are people we
come to know and care about and the pages turn that way. In the shifting source
of narrative from chapter to chapter I didn't want to let go of the storyline
I'd just been in but I was very happy to get back and find out what's going on
elsewhere.
Well, I had some misgivings about whether or not that form would put off
readers. It was the only thing I could think of doing regarding these characters
and how to tell their stories. In a way, the Plains have no excess. If you think
of places where it is rich in vegetation, it seems like there is so much of it
that you almost get lost in it. In the Plains, things are stripped down to the
essentials and that...
Ellen Cooney is the author of nine previous novels, including The Mountaintop School for Dogs and Other Second Chances. Her stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Ontario Review, New England Review, and many other journals,... (more)
If you enjoyed:
Our Souls at Night
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James Anderson grew up in the Pacific Northwest. He is a graduate of Reed College, and received his MFA in creative writing from Pine Manor College. His short fiction, poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in many ... (more)
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