The Middle of Nowhere

“Kent Nelson’s stories ring with the quiet authority of worlds made whole and so without apparent artifice that they become part of our experience and memory.” Alan Wier, author of Departing as Air and Tejano

In “The Middle of Nowhere,” a teenage boy living with his father in a remote trailer in Arizona, fends off his father’s girlfriends, except for an Irish woman, Goldie, who’s the catalyst for his escape from his nowhere life. “I was going somewhere it snowed into the sea—Northern California or maybe Oregon. I wasn’t certain of anything. It was the beginning of a sadness, which, I suppose, had to come to me sometime, an aching that lasted for years.”

Other stories include “Learning to Dream,” about a woman who’d never dreamed until she saw a painting of Goya’s; “Yellow Flowers,” about the parents of a boy who, several times, disappears from school, and “Invisible Life,” about a husband whose wife, and the mother of his three small children, decides to go back to graduate school, forcing the husband to take over the responsibilities. “Invisible Life” was included in The Best American Short Stories.

Each of these stories is marked by an indelible sense of place and an irresistible narrative force.

Sometimes, it was in the middle of nowhere that you truly found yourself, or at least, the beginning of who you were meant to be.
— From "The Middle of Nowhere"
I took my daughter’s hand and squeezed it, and she squeezed mine. The bat fluttered over us, a friend who knew the dark. Lightning flashed farther away and left in is wake the darkness and a soft drizzle which fell around us like music through the leaves.
— From “I Had to Do Something”
This collection contains 13 finely honed tales, many of which have a Southwest locale. Emotions resonate within a mountainous desert setting—a hauntingly beautiful landscape for which Nelson has a nearly mystical affinity; and humans respond to the vulnerability of animals. Nelson’s sensitively crafted fiction draws its strength from immersion in the natural scene, its intensity diminishing when he uses other backdrops.
— Publisher's Weekly

Publisher: Peregrine Smith, 1991

Previous
Previous

Discoveries

Next
Next

The Spirit Bird