Half Wild - by Robin MacArthur (Paperback)

About the Book

Spanning nearly forty years, the stories in Robin MacArthur's debut give voice to the hopes, dreams, hungers, and fears of a diverse cast of Vermonters--adolescent girls, aging hippies, hardscrabble farmers, disconnected women, and solitary men. Straddling the border between civilization and the wild, they all struggle to make sense of their loneliness and longings in the stark and often isolating enclaves they call home.

Book Synopsis

"This heartbreakingly honest and authentic fiction will make you weep over, laugh at, and finally cheer for, mothers and daughters, sons and fathers, lovers and losers, and the human race in general. Half Wild is American fiction, and American literature, at its very best."--Howard Frank Mosher, author of The Great Northern Express and Northern Borders

Spanning nearly forty years, the stories in Robin MacArthur's formidable debut give voice to the dreams, hungers, and fears of a diverse cast of Vermonters--adolescent girls, aging hippies, hardscrabble farmers, disconnected women, and solitary men. Straddling the border between civilization and the wild, they all struggle to make sense of their loneliness and longings in the stark and often isolating enclaves they call home--golden fields and white-veiled woods, dilapidated farmhouses and makeshift trailers, icy rivers and still lakes rouse the imagination, tether the heart, and inhabit the soul.

In "Creek Dippers," a teenage girl vows to escape the fate that has trapped her eccentric mother. In "God's Country," an elderly woman is unexpectedly reminded of a forbidden youthful passion and the chance she did not take. Returning to her childhood house when her mother falls ill, a daughter grapples with her own sense of belonging in "The Women Where I'm From."

With striking prose powerful in its clarity and purity, MacArthur effortlessly renders characters--men and women, young and old--cleaved to the fierce and beautiful land that has defined them.

From the Back Cover

Spanning nearly forty years, the stories in Robin MacArthur's formidable debut give voice to the hopes, dreams, hungers, and fears of a diverse cast of Vermonters--adolescent girls, aging hippies, hardscrabble farmers, disconnected women, and solitary men. Straddling the border between civilization and the wild, they all struggle to make sense of their loneliness and longings in the stark and often isolating enclaves they call home: golden fields and white-veiled woods, dilapidated farmhouses and makeshift trailers, icy rivers and still lakes that rouse the imagination, tether the heart, and inhabit the soul.

In striking prose, powerful in its clarity and purity, MacArthur effortlessly renders characters--men and women, young and old--whose lives are inextricably intertwined with one another and cleaved to the land that has defined them.

Review Quotes

"Move over Annie Proulx, Raymond Carver, and Flannery O'Connor. Make room for Vermont's own Robin MacArthur. This heartbreakingly honest and authentic fiction will make you weep over, laugh at, and finally cheer for, mothers and daughters, sons and fathers, lovers and losers, and the human race in general. Half Wild is American fiction, and American literature, at its very best." - Howard Frank Mosher, author of Where the Rivers Flow North and God's Kingdom

"Move over Annie Proulx, Raymond Carver, and Flannery O'Connor. Make room for Vermont's own Robin MacArthur. Half Wild is American fiction, and American literature, at its very best." - Howard Frank Mosher, author of Where the Rivers Flow North and God's Kingdom

"The stories in Robin MacArthur's stunning debut collection Half Wild are synonymous with its title-gorgeously feral, unusual, and woodsy. MacArthur creates rich narrative terrain teeming with tattooed women, gypsy souls, loggers, drinkers, survivors. She writes with the ear of a musician and a classic, pure command of the short story form, like a dispatch from Eudora Welty in the great north woods." - Megan Mayhew Bergman, author of Birds of a Lesser Paradise and Almost Famous Women

"MacArthur writes with the ear of a musician and a classic, pure command of the short story form, like a dispatch from Eudora Welty in the great north woods." - Megan Mayhew Bergman, author of Birds of a Lesser Paradise and Almost Famous Women

"Feral, wise, deft, elegant, luminous, Robin MacArthur's stories inhabit a reader with shimmering wonder." - Rick Bass, author of All The Land to Hold Us

"MacArthur is able to render complicated situations precisely and depict tenderness and harshness with an equally deft hand." - Publishers Weekly

"MacArthur's multilayered tales involve heady internalization as characters push beyond their preoccupations to inch toward resolution." - Booklist

"Each powerful story in this collection becomes part of a fearsome whole, one that celebrates the ways in which memory itself is half wild." - Ploughshares (online)

"Robin MacArthur is a striking new voice and Half Wild is a stormy marvel of a debut." - Laura van den Berg, author of Find Me and The Isle of Youth

"Half Wild... made me feel a bittersweet nostalgia for all the possible lives I could have led. This is a beautiful and emotionally rich book and it casts a big spell." - Diane Cook, author of Man V. Nature