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Sound the trumpets! This first collection of short stories by Jon Hassler
deserves royal fanfare!! Five of these stories are published here for the first
time. Two—"Chase" and "Chief Larson"—appeared in
literary magazines in the 1970s, before Jon began his meteoric rise to fame as a
novelist. (Jon’s first book, Staggerford, was chosen Novel of
the Year in 1977 by the Friends of American Writers.)
Most of these stories were written during the five or six years preceding Staggerford.
They weren’t publishable then, Jon told us, "because I didn’t have a
name." He wrote twenty-some stories in all, and in the process of
publishing just six of them, collected eighty-five rejection slips. He went
right on writing, he said. "I loved writing, and the stories seemed good to
me."
They seemed good to us, too, and we think you’ll like them as well. The
introductory story, "Chase" was Jon’s first piece of
"memory" work: "I started to write boyhood memories at random in
the late 1970s. Some of them proved pretty provocative so I developed them into
stories." "Keepsakes" and "Resident Priest" are set in
the 1950s, when Jon was growing up in Plainview, Minnesota. "Christopher,
Moony, and the Birds," "Chief Larson," and "Good News in
Culver Bend" are rooted in Jon’s later experiences as an English teacher
in various Minnesota high schools and colleges.
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