Float up, sing down : stories
(Book)

"From 2021 National Book Award Finalist Laird Hunt: a masterful, lapidary portrait of Reagan-era rural life over one summer's day in Indiana, 1982. Candy Wilson has forgotten to buy the paprika. Turner Davis needs to get his zinnias in. Della Dorner told her mother she was going to Milky Freeze, but that's not where she's really headed on her new Schwinn five-speed. Float Up, Sing Down is the story of a single day. But in that day, how much teeming life! The residents of this farming town have their routines, their preferences, their grudges and regrets. The old-timers savor past triumphs, cast back to lives circumscribed and defined by the World Wars, wonder what might have been. Youngsters covet cars, karate moves, kissing; they writhe in the first blushes of love or pain or independence. Gossip is paramount. Lives are entwined. And on everyone's lips: the name of a woman who lived and died apart, the troubled, strange, and dear Irma Ray. Each of the fourteen stories of Float Up, Sing Down follows one character's mid-summer "day-in-the-life" in the fictional town of Bright Creek, one of Hunt's most beloved and enduring communities. As the book unfolds these lives echo and glance off of one another with elegance and warmth, a tenderness born of strength. In the tradition of Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, Elizabeth Strout, and Edward P. Jones, this is a "symphony of souls," a masterful portrait of both loneliness and community by one of our great limners of American experience"--,Provided by publisher.