American Salvage

By: Bonnie Jo Campbell

Narrated by: Jeffrey Brick, Stevie Ray Dallimore, Andrea Gallo, Ken Marks

The fiction of Bonnie Jo Campbell has been honored with the Pushcart Prize, the AWP Award for Short Fiction, and Southern Review’s Eudora Welty Prize. In this stunning collection - a National Book Award finalist - Campbell’s rural Michigan characters are both as jagged as rusty metal and as delicate as the light brush of fading dreams.

American Salvage is rich with local color and peopled with characters who love and hate extravagantly. They know how to fix cars and washing machines, how to shoot and clean game, and how to cook up methamphetamine, but they have not figured out how to prosper in the 21st century. Through the complex inner lives of working-class characters, Campbell illustrates the desperation of post-industrial America, where wildlife, jobs, and whole ways of life go extinct and the people have no choice but to live off what is left behind.

©2009 Bonnie Jo Campbell (P)2010 Recorded Books, LLC

Critic reviews

"These short stories approach their subjects from an array of perspectives, but what they share is freshness, surprise, and a compulsion to plumb some absolute extremes of American existence." (National Book Award citation)

EXCELLENT

What did you love best about American Salvage?

It's literary merit. These stories are not obvious in their intent and meaning. Take the time to consider what the author is saying about struggle, worth, beauty, life, and the short distance between characters who seem very different on the surface

What other book might you compare American Salvage to and why?

I think this book is quite unique, but I guess the closest would be collection of short stories edited by Rushdie. I think it was published in 2005 or 2006.

What about the narrators’s performance did you like?

The style was colloquial, matter of fact, and well-suited to the writing.

Who was the most memorable character of American Salvage and why?

The Trespasser!

Any additional comments?

Excellent choice for college students and professors!!

Beautiful rust belt noir

Bonnie Jo Campbell is an important author, worthy of wide readership and worthy of scholarly attention. This collection is beautiful, tales of broken people who have already lost, but they keep on trying. What could be sadder?