Praise for Nebraska

“Nebraska captures a rowdy, changing America. Written with wit and brawny lyricism, in voices ranging from hip to tender, the stories gathered here are as diverse and expansive as the country they celebrate....References to America's heartland abound throughout the book and serve as a central metaphor for what's close to American hearts, what connects us: dreams, myths and possibilities as vast as the Great Plains. Wise and smart-alecky, creaking with legend and crackling with modernisms, these 10 tales are about American obsessions past and present.’’

—The Washington Post Book World

“Just as Raymond Carver came to be identified with a Pacific Northwest populated by blue-collar workers, and just as Richard Ford has crafted a Montana full of drifters, so Ron Hansen has carved out his own geographical niche. His Nebraska is a distinctive mix of 19th century settlers and 1980's breadwinners, of sudden storms and life-long yearnings, of lost souls stranded in the middle of nowhere. It should put him on the short-story map.”

—USA Today

“Hansen at his best enables us to believe that beyond the quiet beauty of the commonplace are worlds of infinite variation, more mysterious and sometimes more threatening than our daily routines permit us to sense.”

—Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Part Hemingway and part García Márquez—Hansen's something of an all-American magic realist, in other words, a fabulist in the native grain.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“Mr. Hansen's talent for sensuous detail travels very well—to the late 1800's, to the 1940's, to the present day....His language operates elegantly....Deeply gratifying.” —

The New York Times Book Review