American Salvage

American Salvage is not a book for the cowardly. These daring stories, these desperate characters, would just as soon steal your wallet, break your heart or punch you in the gut than openly admit that redemption is possible during these dark times. But it is just this improbable hope that makes her work brilliant. This is Bonnie Jo Campbell at her bravest and best.

American Salvage by Bonnie Jo Campbell is a gritty, heart-wrenching collection of short stories that examines an America our leaders don't want us to see. You will want to turn your head as her stories unfold, but you know you will peek." Campbell reminds us that life isn't always pretty for our neighbors, friends, and relatives. These stories will bore deeply into your psyche, but they also speak of redemption and hope for us all.

While each story stands well alone, as a whole they create an original and irreplaceable portrait of a struggling class of Americans. Her observations are relentlessly honest-no one is spared. But Campbell is a writer who feels deeply for even her most flawed characters, and this is ultimately what makes each of them impossible to forget."

At their best these stories reflect what Robert Lowell refers to as 'the grace of accuracy,' which might simply be a way of saying that the voice overall convinces at every turn. By voice I mean personality, and these quirky, surprising, sometimes arcane and visceral and big-hearted stories resonate in ways that keep me nodding. . . . I love the risk of each story and how, in the midst of hilarity, a much more serious concern unfolds so that I'd find myself both laughing out loud and squeezing my heart dry simultaneously."

I came away from reading American Salvage not only thinking about its literary beauty, but looking at people differently, thinking about their lives, pondering how writing about such damaged, luminous fictional characters can engender, if only momentarily, empathy and compassion, an altered way of seeing. . . . It's a book to take to heart.

In American Salvage, Bonnie Jo Campbell picks through the ravages of a small-town America gutted by shifting demographics, new technology, and methamphetamine. Eschewing nostalgia or bitterness, she leads with her curiosity, using canny observation and sensuous prose to coax the reader into dark, strange, primordial territory.

Campbell's an American voice – two parts healthy fear, one part awe, one part irony, one part realism."

Her writing is raw, precise and unflinching, breaking down our picture of the human condition and throwing it back onto the scattered pile of puzzle pieces that best represent it. . . . As brutal as the details are, Campbell's tales feel like prayers that float upward, those for the poor, the addicted, the lost, and the forgotten. Stunning stuff."