American Salvage

Summary

The fiction of Bonnie Jo Campbell has been honored with the Pushcart Prize, the AWP Award for Short Fiction, and Southern Review’s Eudora Welty Prize. In this stunning collection—a National Book Award finalist—Campbell paints unapologetically frank portraits of broken souls striving for redemption.

In rural Michigan, the American dream, if it ever existed, lies discarded like so much rusty scrap metal. For the inhabitants of Campbell’s tales, the real truth of life can be found in industrial accidents, soul-deadening labor, and the comfort of five drinks too many. But even amid the despair of meth labs and
empty pocketbooks, Campbell’s characters yearn for something, anything, to raise them above it all—and sometimes, impossibly, they find it.

“Readers … will feel salvaged and transformed by this gutsy book’s fierce compassion.”—Booklist, starred review