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About
"Michael Parker has captured a time, place, and sisterhood so perfectly it hurts to turn the last page. A riveting, atmospheric dream of a novel." --Dominic Smith, author of The Last Painting of Sara de Vos
Winner of the 2020 Thomas Wolfe Prize
Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction
The Stewart sisters, pragmatic Lorena and chimerical Elise, are bound together not only by their isolation on the prairie of early 1900s Oklahoma, but also by their deep emotional reliance on each other. They're all they've got . . . until Gus McQueen arrives in Lone Wolf.
An inexperienced first-time teacher, Gus is challenged by the sisters' wit and ingenuity. Then one impulsive decision and a cataclysmic blizzard trap Elise and her horse on the prairie-and the balance of everything is forever changed.
With honesty, poetic intensity, and the deadpan humor of Paulette Jiles and Charles Portis, this novel tells the story of characters tested as much by life on the prairie as they are by their own churning hearts. The author of seven novels and three collections of stories, Michael Parker has been awarded four career-achievement awards: the Hobson Award for Arts and Letters, the North Carolina Award for Literature, the R. Hunt Parker Award, and the 2020 Thomas Wolfe Prize. His short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, Oxford American, Runner's World, Men's Journal, and others. He is a three-time winner of the O. Henry Prize for his short fiction and his work has appeared in dozens of magazines and several anthologies. He taught for twenty-seven years in the MFA Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and since 2009 he has been on the faculty of the Warren Wilson Program for Writers. He lives in Austin, Texas. "The novel is timeless and riveting in its strangeness . . . Parker's gift for language transcends its 1900s setting, finds its peak expression in the sisters' letters, as incisive and deadpan as Charles Portis' True Grit."
-Vogue
"In the tradition of Katherine Anne Porter, Parker's exceptional tale explores the power and strength of kinship on the harsh American frontier."
-Publishers Weekly
"In Prairie Fever, there is humor as well as danger, love as well as longing, and reconciliation as well as lingering spite. It's splendid reading."
-Lone Star Literary Life
"Full of humor as well as anguish, suggesting that some bonds are strong enough to surpass even the most painful betrayal."
-Manhattan Book Review
"Parker's chimerical slipstream of a novel asks, Is it better to hew to that which is, or to see the world as you wish? Readers will surely be pulled deep into the strange and wild river of Elise's fanciful peregrinations."
-Booklist, starred review
"A frontier tale of sibling rivalry. . . Parker's novel isn't as much about sisterhood as love, as the two struggle to reckon with their estrangement head-on; some of the novel's most powerful sections are Elise's letters to Lorena, addressed not directly to sis but to the horse she rode during the blizzard . . . the easygoing, sometimes-smirking nature of the prose (True Grit comes to mind) makes the novel a pleasant ride."
-Kirkus Reviews
"Michael Parker has captured a time, place, and sisterhood so perfectly it hurts to turn the last page. Prairie Fever is a riveting, atmospheric dream of a novel."
-Dominic Smith, author of The Last Painting of Sara de Vos
"What a terrific book this is, wonderful and strange . . . a whole family acting out what can and can't be forgotten, against the backdrops of prairie and range-characters so magnificently and sometimes comically stubborn I really couldn't put the book down. And what other novel has a character writing letters to a dead horse? I was completely taken by this book."
-Joan Silb
Winner of the 2020 Thomas Wolfe Prize
Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction
The Stewart sisters, pragmatic Lorena and chimerical Elise, are bound together not only by their isolation on the prairie of early 1900s Oklahoma, but also by their deep emotional reliance on each other. They're all they've got . . . until Gus McQueen arrives in Lone Wolf.
An inexperienced first-time teacher, Gus is challenged by the sisters' wit and ingenuity. Then one impulsive decision and a cataclysmic blizzard trap Elise and her horse on the prairie-and the balance of everything is forever changed.
With honesty, poetic intensity, and the deadpan humor of Paulette Jiles and Charles Portis, this novel tells the story of characters tested as much by life on the prairie as they are by their own churning hearts. The author of seven novels and three collections of stories, Michael Parker has been awarded four career-achievement awards: the Hobson Award for Arts and Letters, the North Carolina Award for Literature, the R. Hunt Parker Award, and the 2020 Thomas Wolfe Prize. His short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, Oxford American, Runner's World, Men's Journal, and others. He is a three-time winner of the O. Henry Prize for his short fiction and his work has appeared in dozens of magazines and several anthologies. He taught for twenty-seven years in the MFA Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and since 2009 he has been on the faculty of the Warren Wilson Program for Writers. He lives in Austin, Texas. "The novel is timeless and riveting in its strangeness . . . Parker's gift for language transcends its 1900s setting, finds its peak expression in the sisters' letters, as incisive and deadpan as Charles Portis' True Grit."
-Vogue
"In the tradition of Katherine Anne Porter, Parker's exceptional tale explores the power and strength of kinship on the harsh American frontier."
-Publishers Weekly
"In Prairie Fever, there is humor as well as danger, love as well as longing, and reconciliation as well as lingering spite. It's splendid reading."
-Lone Star Literary Life
"Full of humor as well as anguish, suggesting that some bonds are strong enough to surpass even the most painful betrayal."
-Manhattan Book Review
"Parker's chimerical slipstream of a novel asks, Is it better to hew to that which is, or to see the world as you wish? Readers will surely be pulled deep into the strange and wild river of Elise's fanciful peregrinations."
-Booklist, starred review
"A frontier tale of sibling rivalry. . . Parker's novel isn't as much about sisterhood as love, as the two struggle to reckon with their estrangement head-on; some of the novel's most powerful sections are Elise's letters to Lorena, addressed not directly to sis but to the horse she rode during the blizzard . . . the easygoing, sometimes-smirking nature of the prose (True Grit comes to mind) makes the novel a pleasant ride."
-Kirkus Reviews
"Michael Parker has captured a time, place, and sisterhood so perfectly it hurts to turn the last page. Prairie Fever is a riveting, atmospheric dream of a novel."
-Dominic Smith, author of The Last Painting of Sara de Vos
"What a terrific book this is, wonderful and strange . . . a whole family acting out what can and can't be forgotten, against the backdrops of prairie and range-characters so magnificently and sometimes comically stubborn I really couldn't put the book down. And what other novel has a character writing letters to a dead horse? I was completely taken by this book."
-Joan Silb