Us Fools - by Nora Lange (Paperback)

About the Book

"Joanne and Bernadette Fareown are raised on their family farm in rural Illinois, keenly affected by their parents' volatile relationship and mounting financial debt, haunted by the cursed history of the women in their family. Largely left to their own devices, the sisters educate themselves on Greek mythology, feminism, and Virginia Woolf, realizing they must find unique ways to cope in these antagonistic conditions, questioning the American Dream as the rest of the country abandons their community in crisis. As Jo and Bernie's imaginative solutions for escape come up short against their parents' realities, the family leaves their farm for Chicago, where Joanne--free-spirited, reckless, and unable to tame her inner violence--rebels in increasingly desperate ways. After her worst breakdown yet, Jo goes into exile in Deadhorse, Alaska, and it is up to Bernadette to use all she's learned from her sister to revive a sense of hope against the backdrop of a failing world. With her debut novel, Nora Lange has crafted a rambunctious, ambitious, and heart-rending portrait of two idiosyncratic sisters, determined to persevere despite the worst that capitalism and their circumstances has to throw at them"--

Book Synopsis

A tragicomic, intimate American story of two precocious sisters coming of age during the Midwestern farm crisis of the 1980s.

Joanne and Bernadette Fareown are raised on their family farm in rural Illinois, keenly affected by their parents' volatile relationship and mounting financial debt, haunted by the cursed history of the women in their family. Largely left to their own devices, the sisters educate themselves on Greek mythology, feminism, and Virginia Woolf, realizing they must find unique ways to cope in these antagonistic conditions, questioning the American Dream as the rest of the country abandons their community in crisis.

As Jo and Bernie's imaginative solutions for escape come up short against their parents' realities, the family leaves their farm for Chicago, where Joanne--free-spirited, reckless, and unable to tame her inner violence--rebels in increasingly desperate ways. After her worst breakdown yet, Jo goes into exile in Deadhorse, Alaska, and it is up to Bernadette to use all she's learned from her sister to revive a sense of hope against the backdrop of a failing world.

With her debut novel, Nora Lange has crafted a rambunctious, ambitious, and heart-rending portrait of two idiosyncratic sisters, determined to persevere despite the worst that capitalism and their circumstances has to throw at them.

Review Quotes

* National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction Finalist *
* Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction, Winner *
* Los Angeles Times Bestseller *
Best Book of 2024. --NPR, The Boston Globe

"Great American Novels are still being published in 2024 and here is one of them."
--Molly Young, New York Times (Read review.)

"Exquisitely funny... a novel that is uniquely and urgently about and for today, mapping the uncrossable distance between the coasts and the heartland, between the America we've been and the America we want to be. Its reward is to witness a rapturous and rare kind of truth. This savage American novel consumed me, as much as I consumed it."
--Eleanor Henderson, New York Times Book Review (Read review.)

"This novel is tender and exceptionally moving, but also mordantly funny in parts, and it's a razor-sharp critique of American capitalism. And it's written so beautifully that it's hard to believe it's a debut novel."
--Michael Schaub, NPR: Books We Love 2024

"You could read Us Fools as a tight-knit family drama, an historical look at the farm crisis, or an exploration of how economic realities can force us to pick an identity. But more simply, Lange says, it's just about America."
--Andrew Limbong, NPR (Listen to interview.)

"Lange writes in dense paragraphs full of harsh wisdom--vodka tossed on scraped knees--with the ideas and intensity of six novels in one. The result is a fully American artwork that shames, decimates, invents, and reinvents. And reinvents, and reinvents."
--Ryan Chapman, BOMB (Read interview.)
"Exquisitely funny... a novel that is uniquely and urgently about and for today, mapping the uncrossable distance between the coasts and the heartland, between the America we've been and the America we want to be. Its reward is to witness a rapturous and rare kind of truth. This savage American novel consumed me, as much as I consumed it."
--Eleanor Henderson, New York Times Book Review (Read review.)
"Great American Novels are still being published in 2024 and here is one of them."
--Molly Young, New York Times (Read review.)
"This novel is tender and exceptionally moving, but also mordantly funny in parts, and it's a razor-sharp critique of American capitalism. And it's written so beautifully that it's hard to believe it's a debut novel."
--Michael Schaub, NPR: Books We Love 2024 (Read review.)
"You could read Us Fools as a tight-knit family drama, an historical look at the farm crisis, or an exploration of how economic realities can force us to pick an identity. But more simply, Lange says, it's just about America."
--Andrew Limbong, NPR (Listen to interview.)
"Lange's style is complex and comedic... For a debut novel, it is quite remarkable."
--Jane Smiley, Los Angeles Times (Read review.)
"[An] accomplished first novel. The storytelling triumphs with wit, complexity, and vivid precision."
--Kassie Rose, The Longest Chapter (Read review.)
"Lange's achingly stylish prose, brutal humor, and ferocious wit set this novel apart--she captures the tender and complex ways that growing up and growing older can impact sisterhood."
--Kimberly King Parsons, LitHub (Read essay.)
"Lange's debut novel is a refreshingly sardonic take on the decaying ideal of the American dream, with an anti-capitalist tilt. At the end of it all, this is not just a brilliant bildungsroman: Like the classics that the Fareown sisters quote ad infinitum, it's a lush, uncanny mythology itself."
--Kirkus Reviews, starred review
"[A] resonant debut... Lange's lucid story digs deep into the bonds of family and the alliances that are formed and retained across time and despite changing circumstances. Readers will be captivated."
--Publishers Weekly (Read review.)
"This story about two fiercely intelligent, ferocious, feral farm waifs suffering the effects of the 80's farm crisis is at turns outrageous, ponderous, and heartbreaking, but always somehow funny. There are so many ideas and concepts introduced it would take several readings to explore them all. A wonderous exploration of two sisters surviving America."
--Alana Haley, Schuler Books (Grand Rapids, MI)
"A fever dream tale of two sisters growing up in the decaying farm land of our recent past. Lange's style is full of raw and biting prose which makes it impossible to put down. A reminder the raw deal capitalism handed to American farmers and their families."
--Rosa Hernandez, Third Place Books (Seattle, WA)
"Set in the Midwest during the mid 80s farm crisis, Us Fools by Nora Lange follows precocious sisters Jo and Bernie as they navigate small town farm life with their often drunk father and chain-smoking mother. Jo is dramatic and impulsive, while Bernie is the caretaker. Narrated by Bernie in diary like short chapters and continuing up to 2009 Us Fools is a funny yet heartbreaking debut, I loved it!"
--Caitlin Baker, Island Books (Mercer Island, WA)
"Nora Lange's remarkably tender and moving Us Fools is a beautiful portrait of the parallel, intersecting, and occasionally derailing tracks of two sisters coming of age in an America as broken as ever. The backdrop is the Eighties Midwest farm crisis though Lange expertly weaves in classic literature, philosophy, and socioeconomics with a graceful touch, never heavy-handed in how she renders this sibling love story also a cautionary tale of all the innate impossibilities of capitalism in a golden age of consumerism. There is a resounding authenticity to Lange's novel that feels almost startling for a book wired mostly quietly. I think anyone who gets lost in these pages will find themselves haunted for life by Lange's truly singular and yet deeply, painfully, intimately American vision."
--Porochista Khakpour, author of Tehrangeles
"Past and present seep and bleed in this assured, richly ruminative, darkly funny debut. With exacting lyricism, Nora Lange chronicles the tumult and chaotic love between two unforgettable sisters. Us Fools is a marvel of brutal wit and wild charm--a brilliant, sweeping chronicle of a singular American family."
--Kimberly King Parsons, author of Black Light
"This is a novel of heartbreak and beauty, presided over by one of the most idiosyncratic and surprising comedic voices I've encountered in recent times. Lange's narrator, the younger of two sisters, is the true joy of Us Fools, speaking directly to the reader in a deceptively casual voice that is witty and allusive and at the same manages to plumb the sadness hidden deep within our quotidian lives. In all, a smashing debut."
--T.C. Boyle, author of Blue Skies
"With wild dreams and tender considerations, Nora Lange's Us Fools brings us that bond most tangled, mysterious, eternal and dazzlingly reflective: sisters. As farms and families spin, what center holds when the world lets go?"
--Samantha Hunt, author of The Dark Dark
"There is something of the end of America in Nora Lange's portrait of a farming family on a wild and anfractuous path to the brink of collapse. At turns hallucinatory and ruminative, fans of Joy Williams will find a familiar in Lange's sharp-witted prose."
--Amelia Gray, author of Isadora
"Us Fools by Nora Lange is an epic-sized, gloriously-anarchic, blow-out adventure through recent American history. From the farm crisis of the 80's and through the intellectual changes crossing into the new millennium, the novel follows the joys and heartbreaks of one farm family as it's rocked through the wild, political, hilarious, weird, disturbing and occasionally comforting changes in American life. How are we supposed to survive as Americans anyway? Can we? I felt hints of Marilynne Robinson and David Foster Wallace here in this amazing work, and with its smart, rhapsodic language, it feels like Roberto Bolaño's baton has been passed to Nora Lange."
--Robin McLean, author of Pity the Beast
"Us Fools is one of those special books that reorders the world and makes everything new again -- language, family, history, fear, love. Nora Lange writes with the precision of Joy Williams, and the heart of George Saunders, in a voice that is all her own. You won't forget this novel."
--Daniel Alarcón, author of At Night We Walk in Circles
"Us Fools is a boisterous, irreverent, and moving novel about two sisters growing up in an America that doesn't much care for them or their Midwestern farming family. With comic tenderness and with an unforgettable, ferocious voice, Nora Lange paints a remarkable portrait of connection and alienation, of love and heartbreak, and all points in between. "
--Edan Lepucki, author of Time's Mouth
"Us Fools reimagines the intergenerational family saga as a gobsmacked midwestern modern gothic. This novel is an explosion of ideas and a feast of language--a crazy quilt of bafflement, history, love, and danger--made unforgettable by the central sisters Fareown, whose binary star guides us through the wild heartlands of Nora Lange's matchless mind."
--Justin Taylor, author of Reboot
"Midwest farm life in the 1980s gets an inimitable revision through the eyes of the brilliant and unsettling Fareown sisters -- filled with insight, sex, and unpredictable action, Lange's provocative debut dazzles and will be like nothing you've read this year."
--J. Ryan Stradal, author of Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club
"Lange's voice shines in this wonderful debut."
--Elif Batuman, author of Either/Or and The Idiot "A Great American Talent about to become much better known ... fresh, idiosyncratic, witty and brave"
-- Jude Cook, Times Literary Supplement
"Irreverent, candid and seductive"
-- Times Literary Supplement

About the Author

Nora Lange's writing has appeared or is forthcoming in BOMB, Hazlitt, Joyland, American Short Fiction, Denver Quarterly, HTMLGiant, LIT, The Fairy Tale Review, and elsewhere. Her project Dailyness was longlisted for the 2014 Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Performance Writers. She received her MFA from Brown University's Literary Arts Program where she was a Kaplan Fellow. An earlier iteration of her novel Us Fools was shortlisted for The Novel Prize in 2020, a prize to recognize and publish novels that explore and expand the possibilities of the form. She comes from a long line of Midwestern farmers and lives in Los Angeles with her family.