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Acts
of Love on Indigo Road: New and Selected Stories
Reviews
Praise
for Jonis Agee's short fiction
"Jonis
Agee's short stories are thick with the dirt and gravel
of small towns, fast cars and people straining to make
sense of one another. Her characters, most of them living
in the Midwest, are cleareyed about their less-than-perfect
lives. Where they turn for solace becomes the defining
moment in many of these stories, almost half of which
are new, the rest pulled from her previous collections.
Particularly haunting and surreal is "The Waiting,"
in which a plane crash and the resulting array of corpses
and personal objects has an unusual effect on a community
of old folks whose kids have moved away and forgotten
them. In "Good to Go," Agee uses agile but
homespun metaphors to unpack the fate of a car-racing
family whose good luck lasted a year and half, with
dreams "tumbling out hot and fresh like clothes
form the dryer." By turns desperate and moving,
Agee's stories are fine-tuned to a certain eccentric
kind of small-town America."
- The New York Times Book Review
July 20, 2003
"Agee
specializes in sharp-edged, unsentimental miniatures;
the longest story here is 11 pages, and most are less
than half that length. At their best, her fictions are
wonders of concision, expert in the way they distill
the lives and crises of her mainly blue-collar, small-town
characters."
- The Washington Post Book World
"Like
great Midwestern short story writers before her-Weldon
Kees and Dorothy Thomas among them-Nebraskan Jonis Agee
writes of life on the edge of the blue collar. The guy
who runs the fix-it shop. The waitress with the thin
hair and big heart. The revved-up dreams of a demolition
derby family…. Were short stories still having
the heyday of when Kees and Thomas broke into the business,
her name would be hailed for transcribing with poetic
gravity the hardscrabble lives behind the tough-as-nails
American fabric."
- Midwest Living
"In
Indigo Road, readers will find both humanity and hope
as characters chase love and each other with all the
optimism of a dog let loose on the trail of a passing
car on a dusty road."
- Minnesota Women's Press
"With
this collection, Agee proves decisively that she is
a writer who doesn't need chapters when a few hundred
honest and true words can do the job just as well."
- City Pages (Twin Cities)
"The
stories contained within the pages of this tome will
wash over you with tidal waves of heavy emotions-regret,
loss, sadness-so, be careful of the undertow."
- The Examiner (Southeast Texas)
"The
Nebraska native…has staked a claim as small-press
fiction's correspondent among the blue-collar set that
spends its weekends down at the track." - The
Rake
"Agee's
absorbing new collection of short stories, Taking the
Wall, is set in the world of auto racing, but it's really
about those times in life when we have to switch gears.
...Much of the power in Agee's short fiction lies in
what's left unsaid. ... By writing just enough and nothing
more, Agee forces us to imagine the rest. ... spare,
muscular short stories."-The New York Times
on Taking the Wall
"Many
of the residents on Indigo Road-a place just beyond
the pavement where the road turns to gravel or dirt-are
down a lap but not out of the race. Those who populate
the 25 new stories in this collection work dead-end
jobs, make ends meet, and they make do in love, despite
its sometimes glaring imperfections…. In Indigo
Road, readers will find both humanity and hope as
characters chase love and each other with all the optimism
of a dog let loose on the trail of a passing car on
a dusty road."
-Minnesota Women's Press
"Car
racing is somewhere below wrestling and fishing for
me, but I was very, very moved by these stories about
race car families and their aspirations and heartbreaks.
This is universal stuff, and any writer who can compare
motor oil to honey deserves our attention."-Carl
Lennertz, Book Sense 76, Bookselling This
Week on Taking the Wall
"A
.38 Special and a Broken Heart is short-short story
writing at its best. It deserves to be read, read again
and passed to every story-loving friend on down the
road."--Albuquerque Journal on A .38
Special and a Broken Heart
"Death
figures in Agee's tales, but so does forgiveness; despair
and the burden of family share these wide open spaces
with fragile hope and moments of kindness. Agee's fans-and
readers who appreciate the immediacy of good short-shorts--will
find much to relish here."-Booklist on A
.38 Special and a Broken Heart
"The
title of Jonis Agee's new collection of short stories,
Bend This Heart, is instructive, an invitation
to make someone feel, not to break a heart but to bend
it-to change its shape, to turn it in a different direction,
to subdue it-to make a heart work.
"These
are 23 love stories, though the phrase needs qualification.
They are the clear-eyed reports of someone who sees
things as they are, not as she would wish them to be.
... Keenly alive with language, [making] both the heart
and the mind work.- New York Times Book Review
on Bend This Heart
"Some
authors tell stories that have happened but have not
been told before. Agee writes stories that have to be
told before they can be true. The characters could not
come to life, and what happens to them could not have
happened until Agee told the stories: Someone loses
a paring knife that sprouts, grows into a tough tree,
the fruit of which is paring knives. And once Agee has
told this story, it becomes more genuine than if it
had really happened."-Minneapolis Star Tribune
on Pretend We've Never Met
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