Bratwurst Haven: Stories

by Rachel King

Overview

2023 Colorado Book Award Winner, Literary Fiction
“An excellent collection that’s likely to appeal to fans of Alice Munro and Tobias Wolff.” —Kirkus Reviews

It’s almost a decade after the Great Recession, and in Colorado, St. Anthony Sausage has not recovered. Neither have its employees: a laid-off railway engineer, an exiled computer whiz, a young woman estranged from her infant daughter, an older man with cancer who lacks health care. As these low-wage workers interact under the supervision of the factory’s owner and his quietly rebellious daughter, they come to understand that in America’s postindustrial landscape, although they may help or comfort each other, they also have to do what’s best for themselves.

Over the course of these twelve interrelated stories, Rachel King gives life to diverse, complex, and authentic characters who are linked through the sausage factory and through their daily lives in a vividly rendered small town in Boulder County. The internal and external struggles of Bratwurst Haven’s population are immediately and intimately relatable and resonant: these people seek answers within the world they inhabit while questioning what it means to want more from their lives.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781952271496
Publisher:	West Virginia University Press
Publication date:	11/01/2022
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	152
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Rachel King is the author of the novel People along the Sand. Her short stories have appeared in One Story, North American Review, Green Mountains Review, Northwest Review, and elsewhere. A graduate of the University of Oregon and West Virginia University, she lives in her hometown of Portland, Oregon.

Table of Contents

Railing
Visitation Day
A Friendship
A Deal
Poker Night
Childrearing
Murals
At the Lake
Strangers
Middle Age
Pavel
Bratwurst Haven

Editorial Reviews

An excellent collection that’s likely to appeal to fans of Alice Munro and Tobias Wolff—or to anybody with a taste for emotionally resonant short fiction.”
Kirkus Reviews

“Often hovering on the cusp of some potential change, the characters in Bratwurst Haven’s beautifully written stories share a yearning for more—a better relationship or job or simply a chance to feel content. These all-too-relatable struggles make the stories not only engrossing but also an intriguing and tenderly rendered study of this flawed world we call home.”
Rajia Hassib, author of A Pure Heart

“In these twelve linked short stories, Rachel King captures the magic of the American mountain west and the people who call it home. Her characters take work in a sausage factory, pull shifts at a bar to fund their art, struggle with booze and pills, or end up with a haircut after losing at poker. They also care for one another, offering kindnesses both large and small. In Bratwurst Haven, King uncovers the complicated ways humans connect, and she gives it to us in prose that is as crystal clear as a bright Colorado day. It is a collection that builds with each story revealing more and more of the friendships and family that bind us all together—and that we cannot escape from, even when we try.”
Wendy J. Fox, author of What If We Were Somewhere Else and If the Ice Had Held

“Bratwurst Haven is an endearing composite portrait of a working class community in transition.”
Foreword Reviews

From the Publisher

2022-11-16
An understated collection of short stories set in small-town Colorado.

Nobody wants to see how the sausage gets made, but the 10 employees of St. Anthony Sausage don’t have much choice. The workers at the Colorado factory, as well as others in the fictional towns of St. Anthony and Laforge, form the beating heart of the first short story collection from King. The book begins with “Railing,” which follows Lance, who got a job at the factory after losing his job as a railway engineer as the result of a horrible accident. He notes the upside of his new gig—“the temperature kept me alert, and the hard work sometimes distracted me from thinking about the man I’d killed”—but still senses that something’s missing from his life. In “A Friendship,” King tells the life story of Joey, another factory employee, from his childhood in St. Anthony to his service in Vietnam to his eventual death. It’s a stunningly sad tale of regret: “He knows it’s his own fault he doesn’t have friends at the end of his life,” King writes in one of the collection’s most heart-rending passages. King explores sibling dynamics in “Middle Age,” about Valerie, a factory inspector who takes a road trip from Colorado to Oregon with her sister, who’s just retired from the military. The trip doesn’t become the bonding experience Valerie had hoped for: “They’d missed years of each other’s lives, and simply answering these kinds of questions now would not make up for that.” King’s writing is straightforward but elegant, and she suffuses the stories here with knowing details of working-class life. She inhabits every character’s voice beautifully and never condescends to them; this is a book written with care and compassion. It’s an excellent collection that’s likely to appeal to fans of Alice Munro and Tobias Wolff—or to anybody with a taste for emotionally resonant short fiction.

Quiet but powerful.

Kirkus Reviews