No one is better than Jonis Agee at capturing the bone-deep desire and big-eyed longing of a hardscrabble, small-town life. This major collection, highlighting Agee’s astonishing literary achievements, includes powerful new stories and a comprehensive selection from her critically acclaimed books Pretend We’ve Never Met, Bend This Heart, A .38 Special and a Broken Heart, and Taking the Wall.
Jonis Agee’s stories are as broad as their landscape, spanning the Great Lakes and traveling through the Great Plains on a straight shot to the heart. The New York Times refers to Agee’s short fiction as the ". . . clear-eyed reports of someone who sees things as they are, not as she would wish them to be" and each story in this collection is raw, deeply memorable, and dedicated to brutally introspective and truthful moments.
In Acts of Love on Indigo Road, Agee’s characters continue to dream big and love deep while rushing headlong into the awareness that, finally, there are "only the dead to bear witness to what acts of love can do to the world."
"In story after story, the mask drops away from gen-tility, and we come face to face with the truth. These -stories are beautiful because of their courage: there is nothing they are afraid to say."—Charles Baxter on Bend This Heart
Jonis Agee is the author of four novels, four collections of short fiction, and a book of poetry. Three of her books—Strange Angels, Bend This Heart, and Sweet Eyes—were named Notable Books of the Year by The New York Times. Taking the Wall won the ForeWord Magazine Editor’s Choice Award and The Weight of Dreams won the Nebraska Book Award. Jonis Agee is a Nebraska native who has lived and taught throughout the Midwest. She is now Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska—Lincoln.
