{"product_id":"crow-fair-isbn-9780345805911","title":"Crow Fair","description":"\u003cb\u003eSet in   Big Sky Country, a triumphant collection of stories written with a comic   genius in the vein of Twain and Gogol—from from the acclaimed author of \u003ci\u003eNinety-two in the Shade\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eCloudbursts\u003c\/i\u003e, “one of America's best   short-story writers of the last 50 years\" (\u003ci\u003eThe   Boston Globe\u003c\/i\u003e)\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e These stories attest to the generous compass of   Thomas McGuane's fellow feeling, as well as to his   unique way with words. In this collection, filled   with grace and humor, the ties of family make for uncomfortable binds: A   devoted son is horrified to discover his mother's antics before she slipped   into dementia, and a father's outdoor skills are no match for a change in the   weather. But complications arise equally in the absence of blood, as when   lifelong friends on a fishing trip finally confront their deep dislike for   each other. Or when a gifted traveling cattle breeder succumbs to the lure of   a stranger's offer of easy money. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e McGuane is as witty and large-hearted as we have ever known him, and \u003ci\u003eCrow   Fair\u003c\/i\u003e is a jubilant, thunderous confirmation of his status as a modern master.\u003cb\u003eA \u003ci\u003eSan   Francisco Chronicle\u003c\/i\u003e Best Book of the Year\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \"Mysterious and illuminating.... A complex mixture   of hurt, hate, shame, betrayal, admiration, resentment and loss.\" —\u003ci\u003eThe   New York Times Book Review \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"McGuane's masterful storytelling and straightforward prose delivers   an authenticity and a knowingness, making these tales hard to forget.\"   —\u003ci\u003eSan Francisco Chronicle \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"One of America's best short-story writers of the last 50 years.\"   —\u003ci\u003eThe Boston Globe\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"A handsome showcase for McGuane's mix of stoner comedy and   Hemingway-esque machismo.\" —\u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"Bathed in insight, irony and a dark, knowing humor.... Ranks among   [McGuane's] best work.\" —\u003ci\u003eMiami Herald \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"Dazzling ... McGuane rustles up some of his best stories yet ...   [and] continues to burnish his reputation with some of his most accomplished   fiction to date.\" —\u003ci\u003eO, The Oprah Magazine \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"A rich and fascinating portrait of Montana.... McGuane has both honed   the edge of his already sharp tone and, paradoxically, become more   sympathetic to the human condition.\" —\u003ci\u003eNPR \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"Brilliant, bittersweet.... Crow Fairis funny, of course: It couldn't   be written by McGuane if it weren't. But under-girding his signature   visceral, unpredictable humor is a new sense of wistfulness, nostalgia, and   loss.... McGuane narrates his cautionary tales with fierce, energetic concern   that at times feels almost like tenderness.\" —\u003ci\u003eElle magazine \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"One of McGuane's great gifts is the ability to elicit laughter in   dark moments or to jolt the reader of an ostensibly comic tale with a knife   twist of pathos or tragedy.... The only thing [the reader] can expect is to   be surprised-by McGuane's deadpan wit, his hyperactive imagination, and his   deep appreciation for the human comedy.\" —\u003ci\u003eThe Christian Science Monitor \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"One of our best living American short-story writers.... [McGuane]   enriches every life he renders. Even when his characters don't get lucky,   they get great lines.\" -The Seattle Times \"Wonderful.... [McGuane]   is, as Crow Fair proves quite splendidly, a writer, first, last and always-a   delightfully comic one.\" \u003ci\u003e—The Buffalo News \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"McGuane's third short story collection in a career that stretches   back to 1969 ... is a rare, joyous occasion for fans of the genre.\"   —\u003ci\u003eRichmond Times-Dispatch \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"Brilliant.\" —\u003ci\u003eBooklist \u003c\/i\u003e(starred review) \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"With imagery as sparse and striking as the landscape ... [These]   stories highlight the detachment of young from old, husband from wife,   neighbor from neighbor, the dying from life itself.\" —\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly \u003c\/i\u003e(starred review) \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"A slyly cutting batch of tales from a contemporary master....   Seventeen stories, straightforward but well-crafted, that cement McGuane's   reputation as the finest short story writer of Big Sky country.\" —\u003ci\u003eKirkus   Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e (starred review)THOMAS McGUANE lives on a ranch in McLeod, Montana. He is the author of ten novels, including the National Book Award-nominated \u003ci\u003eNinety-two in the Shade\u003c\/i\u003e, three works of nonfiction, and four collections of stories\u003ci\u003e. \u003c\/i\u003eHis work has won numerous awards, including the Rosenthal Award of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and has been anthologized in the \u003ci\u003eBest American Stories\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eBest American Essays\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eBest American Sporting Essays\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cp\u003eHubcaps\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e            In the hardwood forest, a shallow swamp immersed the trunks and roots of the trees near the lake. Owen and Ben hunted tur­tles among the waterweeds and pale aquatic flowers. The turtles sunned themselves on low branches hanging over the water, in shafts of light spotted with dancing dragonflies. Ever alert, the creatures tumbled into the swamp at the first sound, as though wiped from the branches by an unseen hand. The wild surround­ings made Ben exuberant. He bent saplings to watch them recoil or shinnied up trees, and he returned home carrying things that interested him—strands of waterweed, bleached muskrat skulls, or the jack-in-the-pulpits he brought to his mother to fend off her irritation at having to wash another load of muddy clothes. Once, Owen caught two of the less-vigilant turtles, the size of fifty-cent pieces, with poignant little feet constantly trying to get somewhere that only they knew. Owen loved their tiny per­fection, the flexible undersides of their shells, the ridges down their topside that he could detect with his thumbnail. Their necks were striped yellow, and they stretched them upward in their striving. Owen made a false bottom for his lunch box with ventilation holes so that he could always have them with him, despite the rule against taking pets to school or on the school bus. He fed them flies from a bottle cap. Only Ben knew where they were.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e            One afternoon, Owen came back from the swamp to find the flashing beacon of the town’s fire truck illuminating the faces of curious neighbors outside his house. He ran up the short length of his driveway in time to see his mother addressing a small crowd as she stood beside two firemen in obsolete leather hel­mets with brass eagles fixed to their fronts. She looked slightly disheveled in a housedress and golf-club windbreaker, and she spoke in the lofty voice she used when she had been drinking, the one meant to fend off all questions: “Let he who has never had a kitchen grease fire cast the first stone!” She laughed. “Blame the television. Watching \u003ci\u003eThe Guiding Light. \u003c\/i\u003eMea culpa. A soufflé.” Owen felt the complete bafflement of the neighborhood as he listened. Then her tone flattened. “Look, the fire’s gone. Good night, one and all.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e            Owen’s father’s car nosed up to the group. His father jumped out, tie loosened, radiating authority. He pushed straight through to the firefighters without glancing at his wife. “Handled?” The shorter of the two nodded quickly. His father spoke to the neighbors: “Looks like not much. I’ll get the details, I’m sure.” Most had wandered off toward their own homes by then, the  Kershaws among the last to go. Owen’s father turned to his wife, who was staring listlessly at the ground, placed his broad hand on the small of her back, and moved her through the front door, which he closed behind him, leaving Owen alone in the yard.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e            When Owen went in, his parents were sitting at opposite sides of the kitchen table, the \u003ci\u003eFree Press \u003c\/i\u003espread out in front of them. The brown plastic Philco murmured a Van Patrick inter­view with Birdie Tebbetts: it was the seventh-inning stretch in the Indians game. Owen’s father motioned to him to have a seat, which he did while trying to get the drift of the interview. His mother didn’t look up, except to access the flip lid on her silver ashtray. She held a Parliament between her thumb and middle finger, delicately tapping the ash free with her forefinger. His father flicked the ash from his Old Gold with his thumbnail at the butt of the cigarette and made no particular effort to see that it landed in the heavy glass ashtray by his wrist. Commenting on what he had just read, his father said, “Let’s blow ’em up before they blow us up!”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e            “Who’s this?” his mother said, but got no answer. Instead, she turned to Owen. “Your father and I are going to take a break from each other.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e            “Oh, yeah?”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e            “We thought you’d want to know.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e            “Sure.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e            His father lifted his head to glance at Owen, then returned to the paper. Owen knew better than to say a single word, unless it was about the weather. He wanted his parents to be distracted, so that he could fit in more baseball and get any kind of hair­cut he liked, but he worried about things falling apart entirely. He was unable to picture what might lie beyond that. School, of course, out there like a black cloud.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e            His mother said, “Ma said she’d take me in.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e            At this, his father raised his head from the paper. “For God’s sake, Alice, no one is ‘taking you in.’ You’re not homeless.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e            “Why don’t \u003ci\u003eyou \u003c\/i\u003ego someplace, and I’ll stay here? Maybe someone will take you in.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e            “I’ll tell you why: I’ve got a business to run.” His business, which dispatched plumbers and electricians to emergencies, was called Don’t Get Mad, Get Egan and made the sort of living known as decent. With tradesmen on retainer, he worked from an office, a hole-in-the-wall above a florist’s shop. An answering service gave the impression that it was a bigger operation than it was.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e            “Ma will think you’ve failed.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e            “Well, you tell Ma I haven’t failed.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e            “No, you tell her, sport.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e            “I’m not calling your mother to tell her that I haven’t failed. That doesn’t make sense. Owen, where have you been? You look like you’ve been in the swamp.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e            “I’ve been in the swamp.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e            “Would you like to add anything to that?”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e            “No.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e            His mother stubbed out her cigarette and said, “I think you owe your father a more complete answer, young man.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e            “It’s nothing more than a little old swamp,” Owen said. “Mind turning that up? It’s the top of the eighth.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e            Nobody was going anywhere except back to the newspaper.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eExcerpted from Crow Fair by Thomas McGuane. Copyright © 2015 by Thomas McGuane. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46301056270565,"sku":"NP9780345805911","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780345805911.jpg?v=1767724297","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/crow-fair-isbn-9780345805911","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}