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Fifteen linked stories chart a true course through the lives of families, farmers, loggers, former classmates, and the occasional stripper. In the richly imagined town of Renata, Oregon, a man watches his neighbor's big-screen TV through binoculars. An errant son paints himself silver. Mysterious electrical humming emanates from an enormous barn. In A Simplified Map of the Real World, intimate boundaries are loosened by divorce and death in a rural community where even an old pickle crock has an unsettling history-and high above the strife and the hope and the often hilarious, geese seek the perfect tailwind. Stevan Allred's stunning debut deftly navigates the stubborn geography of the human heart.
List of contents
Contents
His Ticky Little Mind / 3
In the Ditch / 21
What Good a Divorce Is / 37
The Idjit's Guide to Intuitive Mastery of Newtonian Physics / 49
The Painted Man / 65
Sink Like a Steamroller, Fly Like a Brick / 95
To Walk Where She Pleases / 115
As Men Will Do Unto the Least Among Us / 123
A Simplified Map of the Real World / 143
Vortex / 165
Trish the Freaking Dish / 191
Conflations of a Hard-Headed Yankee / 205
Doubling Down / 221
On Formal Occasions, Hummingbirds / 243
A Gentleman, Under These Circumstances, Has No Idea / 253
Acknowledgments / 269
Mr. Allred's Fairly Accurate Map of the Kalish & Environs, from Renata, Westward / 272
Story Trees / 274
Reading Group Questions / 279
About the author
Author Stevan Allred lives and writes in a house in the woods halfway between Fisher's Mill and Viola, in rural Clackamas County, outside of Portland, Oregon. He is the editor of Dixon Ticonderoga, a zine that explores the intimate relationship between divorce and pencils. He teaches writing at the Pinewood Table.
Illustrator Laurie Paus has a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Washington. Over the years she has taken drawing and painting classes from the Pacific Northwest College of Art and Oregon College of Arts and Crafts, and recently, she has been studying sculpture at The Gage Academy of Art. She lives on the shores of Lake Union and works as a bookseller at The Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle.
