The Lake, the River and the Other Lake

Zusatztext “A wonderful novel. . . . Very moving and very funny.” — The Washington Post Book World “A comic novel with a dark and thoughtful edge! which is the mark of all good comedy. There is enough absurdity and energetic plotting here! enough incongruity and haplessness to keep the laughs coming.” — Chicago Tribune “Amick displays myriad gifts throughout! creating a believable! heartfelt fictional world and ambitiously introducing a symphonic arrangement of stories. . . . It’s a summer well spent in Amick’s amiable company.” — San Francisco Chronicle “The last writer to celebrate the charms of rural Michigan with equal panache was probably Ernest Hemingway.” — Los Angeles Times Informationen zum Autor Steve Amick’s short fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s , The Southern Review , The New England Review , Playboy , Story , the anthology The Sound of Writing , and on National Public Radio. He has an MFA from George Mason University and has been a college instructor, playwright, copywriter, songwriter, and musician. He lives in Michigan, dividing his time between his hometown, Ann Arbor, and a family cottage on a famously clear lake along the northern edge of the Lower Peninsula. Klappentext The resort town of Weneshkeen, nestled along Michigan's Gold Coast, has become a complex melting pot: townies and old timers mix with ritzy summer folk, migrant cherry pickers, wily river guides, and a few Ojibwe Indians. As the summer blooms, these lives mingle in surprising ways-a lifelong resident and Vietnam Vet pursues the take-no-guff deputy sheriff, while plotting revenge against the jet-skiers polluting his beloved lake; a summer kid from downstate stumbles into a romance with the sexiest rich girl in town; the town's retired reverend discovers the Internet and a new friend in his computer tutor. A resonant social comedy with richly-drawn characters and quirky charm, The Lake, the River & the Other Lake welcomes you into a world that you may never want to leave. Leseprobe 1. There was a heavenly time, a sliver-thin window of peace that Roger Drinkwater cherished every year on Meenigeesis--those early days when the water warmed just enough for him to bear but all others steered clear and he could swim in peace and hear nothing but the water and his breath and the birds and the distant road: the way it had once been on this lake. It was a time before jet-skis; before the idiot boys on their idiot toys, as he thought of them in the little singsong chant that drummed in his head the rest of each summer. One misty predawn in late May, he got his first indication that the lake was now warm enough for at least a few intrepid others. Kids, of course, tended to brave the waters sooner than their finicky parents, and the evidence he found was something that obviously came from a child. It was floating, half-submerged, at the end of his dock, and he bumped his head against it on the return lap of his morning swim: an underwater toy in the shape of a flattened megaphone, purple plastic with a green mouthpiece. If it hadn't had a brand name, Sub-Speaker, stamped on the side, he might not have known what it was for. He stood there in the water, examining it, disgusted. Plastic toys lost in the lake were essentially just pollution. Still, he wondered how well it worked. Glancing around first to make sure he was alone, he knelt to the waterline and put the mouthpiece to his lips. What came out was Chief Joseph One-Song's famous words to Congress: "Nimaanaadendam gaa zhi binaadkamgiziik . . ." The water was so still, the sound waves would carry as if across a drumhead. It's funnier, he decided, if no one can see me, and so he dropped lower in the water, the toy just nosing above the waterline, and he repeated the phrase, making it more guttural and ominous and spooky. He im...

Product details

• Authors: Steve Amick
• Publisher: Anchor Books USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 09.05.2006
• EAN: 9781400079940
• ISBN: 978-1-4000-7994-0
• No. of pages: 384
• Dimensions: 132 mm x 200 mm x 18 mm
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature