Coffee House Press 2003

To Purchase:
www.coffeehousepress.org

!! A pair of reviews of the Japanese edition of Indiana, Indiana are in!!

A moonlit American saga firmly grounded in an Indiana landscape populated by drifters, ministers, sheriffs, and kin-a terrain dominated by big sky and charged with the haunting music of rust-ruined tools and heartbreaking twists of fate...

"Strange, original, and utterly brilliant-Laird Hunt is one of the most talented young writers on the American scene today."-Paul Auster

"Laird Hunt is a marvelous writer and a gutsy one-in Indiana, Indiana he offers an intimate reverie of people and place that, for its lyricism, odd humor, and delicacy, evokes the early Ondaatje."-Rikki Ducornet

"As everyone who read The Impossibly knows, Laird Hunt's ability to create a sense of otherworldliness is astonishing. Indiana, Indiana resonates for miles."-Amy Fusselman

"Like the best American writers, Laird Hunt is recasting the American song, lyrically and philosophically. His novels are smart and refreshing and genuinely unusual. He's a seeker, in the best literary sense. He's looking for and finding vivid language and forms, ways to write what he sees and understands about his and our weird, fortunate, and troubled lives and times."-Lynne Tillman

Library Journal
"The novel succeeds at calling up the ghosts of a generation and a way of life that have almost disappeared. Highly recommended."

Minneapolis Star Tribune
"There are bits of Hunt's novel that are downright delicious with delightful dialogue, clever conclusions to curious problems, and characters you wish you could hear more from."

Ruminator Review
"Hunt is wise in his use of poetic finery…. In a book framed around burials, Hunt's word craft is where the living gets done. The novel in general could stand for more risk taking; all it requires is some narrative confidence and a love of language. Laird Hunt showcases oceans of both…an all-too-rare success in an all-too-rare style."

Kirkus Reviews:
"Faulknerian…vivid (and heartbreaking)."

Publishers Weekly:
"Crisp and visceral … an autumnal serenade to rural America."

Booklist
"A haunting and enigmatic tale told in short, poetic chapters redolent of the subtle Indiana landscape by turns illuminated by fireflies and assaulted by wild weather, it is filtered through the strange psyche of an older man named Noah, who lives in shabby isolation on a cluttered farm. Sitting beside a wood-burning stove, Noah is assailed by troubling memories of the debilitating fits and visions that rendered him incapable of living a normal life. His poignant reflections, which obliquely reveal much about the struggles and woes of Noah's hard-pressed ancestors and immediate family, and the painful mystery of mental illness, are interspersed with short, highly imaginative letters from Noah's wife, Opal, a woman, the reader slowly figures out, whose own psychic afflictions, much to Noah's sorrow, landed her in an asylum. Hunt's somber and quietly beautiful novel is like a slide show, each moody and visually lush chapter a luminous and evocative tableau cast upon the mind of the reader."

Books: A Reader's Catalog
"Laird Hunt's nearly dizzying and powerful narrative wends its way through an entire lifetime during one night in Indiana, Indiana. As an old man, Noah Summers looks back, sometimes unwillingly, through the memories, visions, and regrets he accumulated over the years. This is a feat of a novel, written in an innovative and non-chronological style that is intelligent as well as being evocative and emotional."

Poetry Project Newsletter
"This is an epic series of love stories, spanning generations full of tall tales, switchbacks, revelations, sidetracks, and poems. There is not one false step."

Westchester Journal News, Best of Books issue
"Indiana, Indiana is an episodic story of love lost and a nearly vanished America, whose fragments each speak little worlds and whose landscape one can only leave at the end with regret."