Float Up, Sing Down
Stories
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Float Up, Sing Down
Narrated by:
Holly Palance
Buy for $16.20
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Narrated by:
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Holly Palance
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By:
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Laird Hunt
Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction
Laird Hunt’s “revelatory (NYT)” story collection capturing one summer’s day in the Indiana community where the beloved National Book Award Finalist Zorrie bloomed.
Candy Wilson has forgotten to buy the paprika. Turner Davis needs to get his zinnias in. Della Dorner told her mother she was going to the Galaxy Swirl, but that's not where she's really headed on her new Schwinn five-speed.
Float Up, Sing Down is the story of a single day. But in that day, how much teeming life! The residents of this rural town have their routines, their preferences, their joys, grudges, and regrets. Gossip is paramount. Lives are entwined. Retired sheriffs climb corn bins and muse on lost love, French teachers throw firecrackers out of barn windows, and teenagers borrow motorcycles to ride the back roads.
Each of the fourteen stories of Float Up, Sing Down follows one character’s day in the life in one of Hunt’s most beloved and enduring landscapes. In the tradition of Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, Elizabeth Strout, and Edward P. Jones, this is a symphony of souls, a masterful portrait of both loneliness and community by one of our great limners of American experience.
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Critic reviews
Revelatory, unearthing an ecology of elusive connection and meaning.
The separate stories are subtly connected, like the rings of a stone skipped across a still lake. As the associations build and cohere, you feel Bright Creek more viscerally, both the way it can suffocate from gossip and also lift up the lonely through daily waves and hellos. At times melancholy, at times laugh-out-loud funny, Float Up, Sing Down is a celebration of the universes contained in the everyday. If you are a fan of Elizabeth Strout's depictions of rural Maine, you will love Hunt's openhearted yet wry take on this small corner of Indiana.
Questions of fate and identity meander through these stories . . . Hunt’s characters are not self-created in the manner most modern Americans like to think we are. The ripple effects of an abusive father, an indulgent mother, early success that fizzles—all guide a life’s path, sometimes quite literally . . . And somehow, without even the slightest sentimentality about it, the book provides an elegy for a lost generation, or maybe for all the elders still here, as overlooked as the Midwest itself.
The apparently placid setting disguises a deep reservoir of feeling and lets Mr. Hunt enlarge on his depiction of haunted ordinariness . . . The portrayal of a real community lends a nostalgic feel to the vignettes . . . Polite exteriors and private reckonings characterize the collection.
Hunt has mastered a style that feels both traditional and fresh. [His] stories of Bright Creek . . . offer a timely refresher on human decency. Just as importantly, they remind readers that suffering, joy, death and renewal are all connected factors in life’s crop cycle.
This story takes place over one remarkable day in a small Indiana town. It’s a tale that seems small at first but feels more consequential as it goes on, just like the lives it describes.
Genial and generous of heart, these 14 interlinked stories capture the lives and loves of the inhabitants of Bright Creek in Indiana, where everyone knows everyone and secrets ripple under the surface of their rural world. Brimming with easy-going charm, there’s real heart and hurt here, too, as Hunt unspools the hopes and dreams of his beguiling characters . . . An absolute delight.
An entertaining work of exceptional vitality.
The connective tissue of the stories, each of which is titled after its protagonist, is the characters’ Indiana hamlet, friendly on the surface but riven with subterranean traumas . . . Fans of Hunt’s previous small-town studies will appreciate these lovingly drawn portraits.
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