BookList
“The simplest acts—even just noticing one’s breath—become wondrous moments that push characters past anguish to reclaim their ‘bright, insistent, blooming’ lives. Darkly funny, compassionate, and unsentimental, these quiet stories offer memorable, rarely seen views of Midwestern life.”
New York Times Book Review
“Caspers details the many ways reality can interfere with our dreams….Throughout, Caspers’s people…question the decisions they’ve made or the ones they refuse to make. There’s nothing flashy about Caspers’s prose; like the beauty of the prairie itself, its attraction lies in details seen close up.”
San Francisco Chronicle
“Revving up Willa Cather’s naturalism and lesbian undertones with Denis Johnson’s deadpan Plains rowdiness, these are like alt-country songs, tales of wild but not wild-eyed girls, and women as likely to be enraptured by the girl next door as by the lay of the land. The prose is exact, unsparing, unsentimental….Caspers’s pungent voice, her fairness to city and country mores, and the artful arrangement of her tales reward rereading. Simplicity this precise takes time, talent and considerable cultivation.”
The Short Review
“With her finger firmly fixed on the pulse of each heartbeat in these stories, Caspers is infinitely compassionate and revealing in her details, and the moments of dark comedy captured here leaven what’s already a compelling read.”
The Masters Review
"The Fifth Woman is told as a series of vignettes in which the narrator grapples with the sudden death of her partner. Caspers’ beautiful, moving novel is out from Sarabande this summer."
LAMBDA Book Report
“The elegantly crafted short stories…quietly buzz with life and secrets, like a hot summer afternoon in Midwestern farm county. There is a thread of longing that moves through the stories, as the characters watch their dreams decompose under reality’s harsh glare….Caspers is a careful, unsentimental and highly skilled writer….Like Anne Tyler, another Minnesota-born writer, Grace Paley and to a lesser extent Flannery O’Connor, Nona Caspers digs beneath the surface to examine the small details and then brings to life in this quiet, but lovely collection of stories.”