Midwestern movie house owner Virgil Wander is "cruising along at medium altitude" when his car flies off the road into icy Lake Superior. Virgil survives but his language and memory are altered and he emerges into a world no longer familiar to him. Awakening in this new life, Virgil begins to piece together his personal history and the lore of his broken town, with the help of a cast of affable and curious locals--from Rune, a twinkling, pipe-smoking,...

Two siblings with very different personalities attempt to take control of their mother's food obsession and massive weight gain to save her life after their father walks out and leaves her reeling in the Chicago suburbs.

A "family saga featuring three generations of women who struggle to find freedom and happiness in a small Midwestern college town"--

The automobile industry has abandoned Vacca Vale, Indiana, leaving the residents behind, too. In a run-down apartment building on the edge of town, commonly known as the Rabbit Hutch, a number of people now reside quietly, looking for ways to live in a dying city. Here live four teenagers who have recently aged out of the state foster-care system: three boys and one girl, Blandine, who The Rabbit Hutch centers around. Hauntingly beautiful and unnervingly...

"A sharp and bitingly funny novel about a professor whose calm-ish midwestern life gives way to a vortex of crises--and her attempts to salvage the pieces without going to pieces herself...In the space of a few torrid months on the Iowa prairie, Phillipa Maakestad--long-married theater professor and mother of an unstable daughter--grapples with a life turned upside down. After falling headlong into a passionate affair during a semester spent teaching...

Ruth has been single-handedly raising four young daughters and running her family's Indiana farm for eight long years, since her husband, John, fell into a comatose state. She wishes she could trade places with her older sister, June: blonde and beautiful, married to a wealthy doctor, living in a mansion in St. Paul... and a coveted job as one of "the Bettys," the recipe developers who populate General Mills' famous Betty Crocker test kitchens. But...

Describes a large modern mid-western family who belong to a church that doesn't permit drinking, dancing, or television and discusses their individual reactions when two siblings leave the faith for the temptations of modern culture.

"Portrait of a professor at a Midwestern university who has been patient in his grief after an accident takes the lives of his wife and child and has permitted that grief to enlarge him."--Jacket.

William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to a university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar's life. As the years pass, Stoner encounters a series of disappointments: marriage into a “proper” family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience...