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| Reading a book, photo by Pedro Ribeiro Simões (used under CC license) |
Hezada! I Miss You is now available to win from LibraryThing, a worldwide website for readers of every feather.
Throw your hat into the book lottery and enter by September 15, 2020.
Summary
The last Midwestern traveling circus is due to arrive in a rural village it has visited for a century of summers. Like the village, the circus is on its last leg. It’s down to one elephant and a handful of acrobats. The circus boss’s sweetheart is dying. The former starring act is recovering from cancer. The assistant, Frank, plans to retire after this show. Meanwhile, twins Heza and Abe wander the hot fields and roads, waiting for the circus or anything better. Hezada! I Miss You is a novel that explores tradition, love, and suicide—set under the fading tents of small-town America and the circus.
"It's haunting. It's lovely. It's an utterly painful and beautiful look at how life passes. Exploring the consequences of a suicide from those intimately involved to those on the sidelines, Pringle's unflinching view sets a summer circus as a backdrop for everything lost when life is gone." - The Austin Chronicle
"Set against the fascinating backdrop of a traveling circus, Hezada, I Miss You is a meditation on sorrow—how people deal with it, how they attempt to escape from it, and how, for some, it’s inescapable. It’s a tender novel that should be read slowly, each line given the careful consideration it deserves for the beautiful, heartbreaking insights it holds."
"Brilliant. A heart-wrench of a debut novel. The writing cuts right to the bone, with cadences that sing. Reminiscent of Bradbury and Sherwood Anderson, Pringle's Hezada! I Miss You is a kaleidoscopic vision of love, desire, loss – and life." ~ Regi Claire, author of Fighting It and two-time finalist for Saltire Scottish Book of the Year
Graceful storytelling and poetic clarity make this an enchanting and absorbing novel. I thought about these characters long after I finished the book. The lightness of touch belies the fact that Erin Pringle is a wise and fearless writer. ~ Laura Long, author of Out of Peel Tree
"Pringle captures the dynamics of family and small-town community in a way that recalls Tennessee Williams and Flannery O'Connor, yet her voice is lean and smart and entirely her own. Hezada! I Miss You is a powerful narrative about how we reckon with the cages we're born into, or craft for ourselves. What a beautiful gut-punch of a book.” ~ Melissa Stephenson, author of Driven: A White-Knuckled Ride to Heartbreak and Back
"Hezada! is a stunning first novel—quiet and devastating, an elliptical tale of loss and the limitations and failures of a small town. The circus is always on the verge of arrival, and there is something deeply sinister in that." ~ Polly Buckingham, author of Expense of a View
"With the cool-minded skill of a funambulist, the foolhardy courage of a human cannonball, and the secretive, poignant wisdom of a melancholy clown, Erin Pringle will leave you dazzled and bleary-eyed with Hezada! I Miss You. Your lesser half will want to keep this book to yourself. Your better half will want to share its wonders with the world." ~ Tom Noyes, author of Come by Here: A Novella and Stories
Here is a book that gives in novel form—people as stories performing like poems (“Where did your death come from?”) Where language is velocity & mass whereby the turn of phrase is the continually changing way people fall into or out of collective speech, demonstrating how our vulnerabilities to each other can transform into our feeling with others. ~ Julia Drescher, author of Open Epic
“Spare, haunting, as honest as poetry gets, Hezada! I Miss You is a dream of a novel that conforms to neither expectation nor demand. Though the external forces at work on this family succeed in tugging them away from one another, Pringle's precisely woven narrative connections are unbreakable. She again finds a way to render time and place as emotional states, while making memory as corporeal as you or me.” ~ Jack Kaulfus, author of Tomorrow or Forever: Stories
"This is a tale about magic, about longing, about the sometimes crushing weight of dreams. About the flashes of excitement that keep us alive." ~ Ann Tweedy, author of The Body's Alphabet
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