A dozen stories deal with a heartbroken widower, hunters, farmers and truck drivers living in Minnesota.

The feature film Sweet Land was based on this short story about a Norwegian American farmer and his German immigrant common-law bride. Excerpted from Sweet Land: New and Selected Stories.

Includes "A Gravestone Made of Wheat", the basis of the independent film Sweet Land.

The Great Plains are as rich and integral a part of American literature as they are of the North American landscape. In this volume the stories, poems, and essays that have described, celebrated, and defined the region evoke the world of the American prairie from the first recorded days of Native history to the realities of life on a present-day reservation, from the arrival of European explorers to the experience of early settlers, from the splendor of the vast and rolling grasslands to the devastation of the Dust Bowl. Several essays look to the future and explore changes that would embolden the people of the Plains to continue to call home this place they have learned to value in spite of its persistent challenges. ø The infinite variety of the Great Plains landscape and its people unfolds in works by writers as diverse as Willa Cather, Loren Eiseley, Louise Erdrich (Ojibwe), Diane Glancy (Cherokee), Langston Hughes, Wes Jackson, Garrison Keillor, William Least Heat-Moon, Kathleen Norris, Wright Morris, Francis Parkman, O. E. R”lvaag, Mari Sandoz, William Stafford, Mark Twain, Douglas Unger, James Welch (Blackfeet), and Canadians Sharon Butala and Sinclair Ross. From tribal histories to the impressions of travelers today, from tales of isolation and nature?s furious storms to accounts of efforts to build communities, from flights of fancy to nuanced observations of the ecology of the grasslands, this comprehensive volume provides a history of the intricate relationships of land and people in the Great Plains.

The Oshkaabewis Native Journal is a interdisciplinary forum for significant contributions to knowledge about the Ojibwe language.

The Great Plains has long been fertile ground for literature. The Nature of the Place is a comprehensive study of novels and stories by such Plains writers as Willa Cather, Wright Morris, Mari Sandoz, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Frederick Manfred, Wallace Stegner, and Bess Streeter Aldrich. Throughout, Diane Dufva Quantic is aware of the region’s collective social and cultural history—aware of the immensely fruitful clash between that complex history and Plains myth (such as “Garden of the World” and “Great American Desert”). In the vast and changeable Great Plains, as Wright Morris once remarked, “Many things would come to pass, but the nature of the place would remain a matter of opinion.”

"'Each morning I would strike out for this temple of learning in the crisp autumn air with a sense of purpose and the conviction that this was where I belonged'--Marilyn Stasio from 'My Research Project.' Inspired partly by Richard Altick's The Scholar Adventurers, the thirteen writers in Curiosity's Cats offer powerful arguments for the value of hands-on research, be it chasing documents, cracking mysteries, interviewing long-lost subjects, or visiting exotic and not-so-exotic locales. Alberto Martinez explains how diligence with dates can provide clues to unlock the most difficult historical puzzles. Jan Reid explores the difference between research for an epic novel and research to write the epic biography of a friend. Margot Livesey suspects that she continues to write novels simply to do the research. But every essay testifies to the fact that research is valuable not only because of the product that may result from it, but because the process itself fulfills a basic human need. Contributors include: Philip J. Anderson, Annette Kolodny, Theodore Kornweibel Jr., Margot Livesey, Alberto A. Martinez, Bruce Joshua Miller, Katherine Hall Page, Jan Reid, Ali Selim, Marilyn Stasio, Ned Stuckey-French, Bruce White, and Steve Yates. Bruce Joshua Miller has edited two books and written for public radio, the Chicago Tribune, and other publications. He has worked in the book industry for thirty-five years"--