Indian village -- Schooners -- Sightings -- Westward expansion -- The clowns -- Line of scrimmage -- Dixie land -- Loose lips sink ships -- Robotics -- Missing Mary
B. J. Hollars's debut short story collection offers ten thematically linked tales, all of which are out to subvert conventional notions of the midwestern coming-of-age story. The stories feature an assemblage of Bigfoot believers, Civil War reenactors, misidentified Eskimos, and grief-stricken clowns, among other outcasts incapable of finding a place in their worlds. In these marvelous stories, we can join a family on a very 21st-century trip along the Oregon Trail, watch as a boy builds a brother from a vacuum cleaner, follow a sandlot baseball team as it struggles to overcome an invasion
