“This candy-store of Idaho characters—alive with Burbick’s eye for telling detail—are all connected.”
—BRYAN CHARLES CLARK,Washington State Magazine
—BRYAN CHARLES CLARK,Washington State Magazine
|
Based on the 2009 shooting of a Nez Perce man by an Idaho State Police officer, Stripland follows four characters whose lives were upended by this death. Reality bends and perceptions warp as each one travels the same route from the McDonald’s at the base of 21st Street up the hill to Dave's Pawn Shop on Thain Road in the city of Lewiston, Idaho. The separate stories of a homeless man, a woman lawyer, a bereft photographer and an internet trickster eventually intersect and overlap as they try to understand, exploit, or seek revenge for the killing.
Reviews of Stripland:
“This candy-store of Idaho characters—alive with Burbick’s eye for telling detail—are all connected. But the real heroes of this moving and beautiful first novel are a couple of tween girls and their wise and pragmatic Nez Perce aunties. They lead this whole grief-mad crew back to the reservation, to the waters of the Snake—and to some sort of state of grace and healing.
Burbick has brushed up against the story of the shooting death of Randall Vernon Ellenwood with butterfly wings—and churned up a storm. Burbick spent decades as a professor of English at Washington State University on the Palouse Prairie—on Nez Perce lands—just north of the Lewiston Valley. She researched gun culture and the ways in which violence and trauma shape us. Now writing novels, Burbick is at once a poet telling stories, a dancer running interference so that the true and the good may pass, and a sculptor of mirrors, making us look at the magnetic fields that entwine us, human and nonhuman beings all.” “Stripland is a mystical tale of Lewiston’s dark side.”
Other Books by Joan Burbick:
Thoreau’s Alternative History:
Changing Perspectives on Nature, Culture and Language Healing the Republic: The Language of Health and the Culture of Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America Rodeo Queens and the American Dream Gun Show Nation: Gun Culture and American Democracy Beyond Imagined Uniqueness: Nationalisms in Contemporary Perspectives (edited) |
from Reviews of Other Books by Joan Burbick:
"A brilliant and insightful reading of America's gun culture, rooted in the history of social violence, which illuminates the conflict between 'gun rights' and civil rights in American Democracy."
—Richard Slotkin, historian and novelist, Gunfighter Nation: Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth Century America
"Gun Show Nation provides an indispensable ethnographic guide to America's obsession with guns. Anyone interested in understanding the future of gun control and the remarkable resiliency of gun rights in American culture will need to grapple with Burbick's richly nuanced study of gun shows."
—Saul Cornell, historian, A Well-Regulated Militia: The Founding Fathers and the Origins of Gun Control in America
|
"Burbick serves up a delectable slice of Americana." --Atlantic Journal-Constitution
“[Burbick] is capable of showing us both the glitter and the glamour of the rodeo subculture, and at the same time, some of its deepest contradictions." --Los Angeles Times
|
"This book tells a story about The West that has not been told before. And it tells it with clarity, humor, faith, skepticism, and a guarded kind of love (which is the best kind of love.) Rodeo Queens are just as important to the idea of The West as Indian chiefs and gunfighters, but more important as their story has not been told."
—Sherman Alexie, novelist and poet, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
About the AuthorFor more than thirty years, Joan Burbick lived in the Palouse region of northern Idaho and eastern Washington writing and teaching at Washington State University with periodic stints as a visiting professor at universities in Beijing, Hong Kong, and Warsaw. At present, she resides on an island off the coast of Washington. Her two nonfiction books, Rodeo Queens and the American Dream and Gun Show Nation: Gun Culture and American Democracy were based on years of interviewing people about how the myths of the West shape everyday life. These interviews led her to many people whose lives were dramatically altered by violence. And their stories led her to Stripland, her first novel.
|
|
