Us Fools - Nora Lange

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Résumé :
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....

Biographie:
Nora Lange's debut novel Us Fools was awarded the The Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction, was named a best book of 2024 by The Boston Globe and NPR, a Los Angeles Times bestseller, and a New York Times Editors' Choice. An earlier iteration of it was shortlisted for The Novel Prize from New Directions Press. Nora's writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Believer, BOMB, Hazlitt, Joyland, American Short Fiction, Denver Quarterly, HTMLGIANT and elsewhere. Her project Dailyness was longlisted for the 2014 Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Performance Writers. She has received fellowships from Brown University and is a fellow at USC's Los Angeles Institute of the Humanities. She recently moved to Salt Lake City with her family. Her short story collection, Day Care, is forthcoming with Two Dollar Radio, April 2026...

Sommaire:
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....