Nona Caspers (Heavier Than Air) at Cody's Books March 18, 2007

Sunday, March 18 - Nona Caspers
7:00 PM at Cody's Stockton Street in San Francisco

NONA CASPERS talks about HEAVIER THAN AIR. Nona Caspers migrated to San Francisco from blue collar rural Minnesota and is an assistant professor at San Francisco State University. Her newly released book of stories, HEAVIER THAN AIR, won the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction from the AWP. Booklist noted, "Several of the central characters are girls growing up in the 1960s and '70s who struggle with secret longings for other girls, and their passionate awakenings are an undercurrent to the adults' foggy fatigue. In several stories, the simplest acts -- even just noticing one's breath -- become wondrous moments that push characters past anguish to reclaim their "bright, insistent, blooming" lives. Darkly funny, compassionate, and unsentimental, these quiet stories offer memorable, rarely seen views of midwestern life." The New York Times Book Review notes, "Many of Caspers's stories are set in Minnesota's cattle and dairy country, and all of them traffic in the kind of Midwestern realism that doesn't rely on pyrotechnics to generate dramatic heat. Throughout, Caspers's people -- it's difficult to consider some of them mere characters -- question the decisions they've made or the ones they refuse to make. There's nothing flashy about Caspers's prose; like the beauty of the prairie itself, its attraction lies in details seen close up." Caspers' stories have been widely published in literary journals and anthologies; she has received an Iowa Fiction Award from the Iowa Review, a Cooper Prize from the Ontario Review, a Joseph Henry Jackson Literary Award, and a Barbara Demming Memorial Award. She is also the author of the novel The Blessed. 7:00 PM at Cody's Stockton Street, San Francisco

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