Overview

At age forty six years US author Poe Ballantine ends his nomadic lifestyle and brings his beautiful wife from Mexico to Chadron, Nebraska, and becomes a father to a son who may be autistic. His neighbor, a math professor at Chadron State College, disappears and three months later is found burned to death and tied to a tree in the woods. What happened to him? Was it murder? Suicide? Poe and a cast of memorable characters from Chadron aim to find out.

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9780983477549

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Reviews

<br>Poe Ballantine is brilliant, sensitive, unique, and universal. Reading his work is inspiring, agitating, and invigorating. He is utterly transparent on the page, a rare thing. He's like a bird that's almost but not quite extinct. This is his best book ever. -- Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild <br>Poe Ballantine's prose cuts right to the bone (the one that's stuck in America's throat), but manages to preserve not only the sweetest meat but the barbecue sauce, as well. Mark Twain would have admired his wit, and had Oscar Wilde read him, he would have bought an old Ford pickup and moved to Nebraska the day he got out of the slammer, hoping that some of his style rubbed off on him. A book without style is like a swan without feathers--it's just another plucked chicken--but this new one of Ballantine's is in its funky way majestic as it zigzags downstream. Poe Ballantine is the most soulful, insightful, funny, and altogether luminous under-known writer in America. He knocks my socks off, even when I'm barefoot. -- Tom Robbins, author of Villa Incognito <br>Ballantine's writing is secure insecurity at its best, muscular and minimal, self-deprecating on the one hand, full of the self's soul on the other. -- Lauren Slater, Lying <br>If the delights of either Poe Ballantine or Chadron, Nebraska were a secret, that is over now. Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere is an unprecedented combination of all of the following: true crime page-turner, violently funny portrait of a tiny Western town, field guide to saving a bilingual marriage and raising an autistic child, sutra on living with open mind and big heart. Many of the sentences start on earth and end somewhere in beat-poet heaven. Ballantine comes ever closer to being my favorite creative nonfiction writer and this is why. -- Marion Winik, Above Us Only Sky. The Glen Rock Book of the Dead and NPR correspondent <br>Book club pick for Rumpus book club August, 2103 <br>Poe Ballantine essa

<br>Poe Ballantine is brilliant, sensitive, unique, and universal. Reading his work is inspiring, agitating, and invigorating. He is utterly transparent on the page, a rare thing. He's like a bird that's almost but not quite extinct. This is his best book ever. -- Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild <br>Poe Ballantine's prose cuts right to the bone (the one that's stuck in America's throat), but manages to preserve not only the sweetest meat but the barbecue sauce, as well. Mark Twain would have admired his wit, and had Oscar Wilde read him, he would have bought an old Ford pickup and moved to Nebraska the day he got out of the slammer, hoping that some of his style rubbed off on him. A book without style is like a swan without feathers--it's just another plucked chicken--but this new one of Ballantine's is in its funky way majestic as it zigzags downstream. Poe Ballantine is the most soulful, insightful, funny, and altogether luminous under-known writer in America. He knocks my socks off, even when I'm barefoot. -- Tom Robbins, author of Villa Incognito <br>Ballantine's writing is secure insecurity at its best, muscular and minimal, self-deprecating on the one hand, full of the self's soul on the other. -- Lauren Slater, Lying <br>If the delights of either Poe Ballantine or Chadron, Nebraska were a secret, that is over now. Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere is an unprecedented combination of all of the following: true crime page-turner, violently funny portrait of a tiny Western town, field guide to saving a bilingual marriage and raising an autistic child, sutra on living with open mind and big heart. Many of the sentences start on earth and end somewhere in beat-poet heaven. Ballantine comes ever closer to being my favorite creative nonfiction writer and this is why. -- Marion Winik, Above Us Only Sky. The Glen Rock Book of the Dead and NPR correspondent <br>Praise for 501 Minutes to Christ: <br>Name author we all need to read

<br>Poe Ballantine is brilliant, sensitive, unique, and universal. Reading his work is inspiring, agitating, and invigorating. He is utterly transparent on the page, a rare thing. He's like a bird that's almost but not quite extinct. This is his best book ever. -- Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild <br>Poe Ballantine is the most soulful, insightful, funny, and altogether luminous under-known writer in America. He knocks my socks off, even when I'm barefoot. -- Tom Robbins, author of Villa Incognito <br>Ballantine's writing is secure insecurity at its best, muscular and minimal, self-deprecating on the one hand, full of the self's soul on the other. -- Lauren Slater, Lying <br>If the delights of either Poe Ballantine or Chadron, Nebraska were a secret, that is over now. Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere is an unprecedented combination of all of the following: true crime page-turner, violently funny portrait of a tiny Western town, field guide to saving a bilingual marriage and raising an autistic child, sutra on living with open mind and big heart. Many of the sentences start on earth and end somewhere in beat-poet heaven. Ballantine comes ever closer to being my favorite creative nonfiction writer and this is why. -- Marion Winik, Above Us Only Sky. The Glen Rock Book of the Dead and NPR correspondent <br>Praise for 501 Minutes to Christ: <br>Name author we all need to read? Poe Ballantine's exquisitely funky 501 Minutes to Christ. -- Tom Robbins, author of Jitterbug Perfume <br>Ballantine is never far from the trenches . . . the essays are readable and entertaining and contain occasional moments of startling beauty and insight. Still, the themes of addiction (to substances, people, new starts, the prospect of fame), dissatisfaction, and nihilism may limit the work's appeal; as with writers such as Chuck Palahniuk, some will become rabid devotees, while others will be turned off. -- Library Journal <br>Praise for Decl

Author Information

"Poe Ballantine's work has appeared in ""The Atlantic Monthly, The Sun, Kenyon Review, "" and ""The Coal City Review."" In addition to garnering numerous Pushcart and O. Henry nominations, Mr. Ballantine's work has also been included in ""The Best American Short Stories 1998"" and ""The Best American Essays 2006"" anthologies. Cheryl Strayed is the author of the number-one ""New York Times"" bestseller ""Wild, "" the ""New York Times"" bestseller ""Tiny Beautiful Things, "" and the novel ""Torch""""Wild"" was chosen by Oprah Winfrey as her first selection for Oprah's Book Club 2.0 and optioned for film by Reese Witherspoon's production company, Pacific Standard. Strayed has written the ""Dear Sugar"" column on TheRumpus.net since March 2010. Her writing has appeared in ""The Best American Essays, the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post Magazine, Vogue, Allure, The Missouri Review, Creative Nonfiction, The Sun"" and elsewhere. Her books have been translated into twenty-six languages around the world."

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