A Gravestone Made of Wheat: The Short Story That Inspired Sweet Land

by Will Weaver

Overview

A Gravestone Made of Wheat is a poignant and lyrical story of land, love, and the American immigrant experience. Now an award-winning indie film distributed by 20th Century Fox. Available everywhere on DVD. http://www.sweetlandmovie.com/ Excerpted from the paperback original, Sweet Land: New and Selected Stories (Borealis Books, 2006), by Will Weaver.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780873518802
Publisher:	Minnesota Historical Society Press
Publication date:	11/01/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	20
File size:	125 KB

About the Author

Will Weaver is the winner of the McKnight and the Bush Foundation's prizes for fiction. His stories "Heart of the Fields" and "Dispersal," which are included in A Gravestone Made of Wheat, were selected as two of the Ten Best Short Stories of 1984 and 1985 by the PEN Fiction Project. Weaver lives in Bemidji, Minnesota.

Editorial Reviews

In these 12 stories, the author of the impressive Red Earth, White Earth limns a poignant burial on the family farm, a memorable deer hunt, the tragic auction of a foreclosed farm. ``Weaver captures the flow of family cycles and lifestyles in a very American landscape,'' opined PW. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Although the characters in these deeply satisfying stories are instantly recognizable, Weaver probes beneath the recognition to offer new insights into ordinary American lives. He writes about farmers, hunters, and breadtruck drivers, but unlike the characters in other recent stories of blue-collar people, his people are rooted: in their land, their families, their religion, their dreams of love. Weaver not only knows these people, presenting them as they are, he likes them. Yet he never allows his affinity to become sentimental. As a result, we are at home with them; in their goodness and their perversity they are as familiar as members of our family. Even in a story like ``Blood Pressure,'' more quirky than the others, Weaver has the talent to make us believe.-- Marcia Tager, Tenafly, N.J.

Library Journal