Homeland and Other Stories

by Barbara Kingsolver

Overview

“Extraordinarily fine. Kingsolver has a Chekhovian tenderness toward her characters. . . . The title story is pure poetry.” —Russell Banks, New York Times Book Review

With the same wit and sensitivity that have come to characterize her highly praised and beloved novels, acclaimed author Barbara Kingsolver gives us a rich and emotionally resonant collection of twelve stories. Spreading her memorable characters over landscapes ranging from Northern California to the hills of eastern Kentucky and the Caribbean island of St. Lucia, Kingsolver tells stories of hope, momentary joy, and powerful endurance. In every setting, Kingsolver's distinctive voice— at times comic, but often heartrending—rings true as she explores the twin themes of family ties and the life choices one must ultimately make alone.

Homeland and Other Stories creates a world of love and possibility that readers will want to take as their own.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780063265127
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	09/06/2022
Series:	Harper Perennial Olive Editions
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	204,463
Product dimensions:	6.90(w) x 4.60(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Barbara Kingsolver was born in 1955 and grew up in rural Kentucky. She earned degrees in biology from DePauw University and the University of Arizona, and has worked as a freelance writer and author since 1985. At various times she has lived in England, France, and the Canary Islands, and has worked in Europe, Africa, Asia, Mexico, and South America. She spent two decades in Tucson, Arizona, before moving to southwestern Virginia where she currently resides.

Her books, in order of publication, are: The Bean Trees (1988), Homeland (1989), Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike (1989), Animal Dreams (1990), Another America (1992), Pigs in Heaven (1993), High Tide in Tucson (1995), The Poisonwood Bible (1998), Prodigal Summer (2000), Small Wonder (2002), Last Stand: America’s Virgin Lands, with photographer Annie Griffiths (2002), Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (2007), The Lacuna (2009), Flight Behavior (2012), Unsheltered (2018), How To Fly (In 10,000 Easy Lessons) (2020), Demon Copperhead (2022), and coauthored with Lily Kingsolver, Coyote's Wild Home (2023). She served as editor for Best American Short Stories 2001. 

Kingsolver was named one the most important writers of the 20th Century by Writers Digest, and in 2023 won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel Demon Copperhead. In 2000 she received the National Humanities Medal, our country’s highest honor for service through the arts. Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages and have been adopted into the core curriculum in high schools and colleges throughout the nation. Critical acclaim for her work includes multiple awards from the American Booksellers Association and the American Library Association, a James Beard award, two-time Oprah Book Club selection, and the national book award of South Africa, among others. She was awarded Britain's prestigious Women's Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize) for both Demon Copperhead and The Lacuna, making Kingsolver the first author in the history of the prize to win it twice. In 2011, Kingsolver was awarded the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for the body of her work. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

She has two daughters, Camille (born in 1987) and Lily (1996). She and her husband, Steven Hopp, live on a farm in southern Appalachia where they raise an extensive vegetable garden and Icelandic sheep. 

Date of Birth:

April 8, 1955

Place of Birth:

Annapolis, Maryland

Education:

B.A., DePauw University, 1977; M.S., University of Arizona, 1981

Website:

http://www.kingsolver.com

Read an Excerpt

Chaptet One

HOMELAND

My great-grandmother belonged to the Bird Clan. one of the fugitive bands of Cherokee who resisted he year that General Winfield Scott was in charge of prodding the forest people from their beds and removing them westward. Those few who escaped his notice moved like wildcat families through the Carolina mountains, leaving the ferns unbroken where they passed, eating wild grapes and chestnuts, drinking when they found streams. The ones who could not travel, the aged and the infirm and the very young, were hidden in deep cane thickets where they would remain undiscovered until they were bones. When the people's hearts could not bear any more, they laid their deerskin packs on the ground and settled again.

General Scott had moved on to other endeavors by this time, and he allowed them to thrive or perish as they would. They built clay houses with thin, bent poles for spines, and in autumn they went down to the streams where the sycamore trees had let their year's work fall, the water steeped brown as leaf tea, and the people cleansed themselves of the sins of the scattered-bone time. They called their refugee years The Time When We Were Not, and they were for given, because they had carried the truth of themselves in a sheltered place inside the flesh, exactly the way a fruit that has gone soft still carries inside itself the clean, hard stone of its future...

Homeland and Other Stories. Copyright © by Barbara Kingsolver. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Reading Group Guide

Plot Summary:

"Remember that story," she often commanded at the end, and I would be stunned with guilt because my mind had wandered onto crickets and pencil erasers and Black Beauty.

"I might not remember," I told her. "It's too hard."

Great Mam allowed that I might think I had forgotten. "But you haven't. You keep it stored away," she said. "If it's important, your heart remembers."

I had known that hearts could break and sometimes even be attacked, with disastrous result, but I had not heard of hearts remembering. I was eleven years old. I did not trust any of my internal parts with the capacity of memory.

-Gloria St. Clair in Homeland

In these twelve tender and humorous stories, Kingsolver creates a series of memorable characters, mostly women who are barely scraping by, but whose inner lives are rich and deep as they struggle to make sense of their lives. In the midst of poverty, abandonment, or loss, these women are determined to articulate for themselves what it means to be who they are, and in so doing, assert the significance of their lives. The more remarkable of these tales evoke the legendary and visionary qualities of myth. Among these is the title story, a story Russell Banks called "pure poetry," written in a language so exquisite that "no synopsis can do it justice." In it, the narrator describes a childhood memory of her family's trip to her grandmother's homeland, Cherokee, Tennessee, so that Great Mam could see it before she died. What they see are ugly, depressing results of theviolent destruction of the Cherokee past; against these losses, the grandmother's storytelling becomes a form of genuine cultural preservation. In "Rose-Johnny" a ten-year-old girl confronts the sexual and racial complexities of the South in the figure of a strange woman. Another story, "Why I am a Danger to the Public," is about the sharp-tongued Vicki Morales, a crane operator in a New Mexico mining town, who, at great risk, leads a wildcat strike. At once realistic and idealistic, these stories suggest that humans are both poignantly fragile, but also, luckily, resilient.

-1990 American Library Association Best Books of the Year

Kingsolver on the Characters in her Fiction
"I write about people who may not automatically command respect because of their positions in life. They aren't people who are normally thought to be the stuff of literature. They're not heroes. They're the single mom who lives next door to you and runs over to ask if you'll watch her baby while she takes her cat to the vet because it just swallowed mothballs. They're two women in a kitchen, not the three muskateers. Beginning with the understanding that they are not automatically invested with greatness, I want them to tell their own stories, in their own words. I want your sympathy -- I want you to listen to these people and to believe them and to understand the value of their lives. That's why I rely so heavily on the first-person narrative. Even if hese characters don't have flashy vocabularies, they still have poetic thoughts. And there's no way you, the reader, will ever know that unless I let you inside their minds."

For additional copies, contact your local bookseller.

Topics for Discussion:
1.A number of these stories deal with mother-daugther relationships. What are some of the very different kind of mother-daughter bonds that occur in various stories (both positive and negative)? What different themes are explored in these relationships?

2. One theme of these tales is the deliberate destruction of the past, on a personal level and a cultural level. How does this annihilation of the past affect specific characters in the present? What do these stories suggest about what is happening in the world?

3. Why do you think the story "Homeland" might have been chosen to be the title story in this collection? Would you have chosen a different one, on the basis of its strength or theme that unifies the collection?

Editorial Reviews

Kingsolver understands in an uncanny way the significance of the ordinary, the fleeting moment that may become lost or become catharsis. She writes with refreshing clarity, humor and honesty.

Detroit Free Press

Kingsolver’s humanity sounds the clearest note.telling us about characters in the middle of their days, who live as we really do, from one small incident of awareness to the next.

|Los Angeles Times

"Extraordiarily fine . . . Kingsolver has a Chekhovian tenderness toward her characters . . . The title story is pure poetry."

Russell Banks

Kingsolver is an extraordinary storyteller.

Chicago Tribune

"Delightful."

New York Woman

Read Homeland and Other Stories and you will feel glad to be alive. You are delighted by a gifted storyteller. You are strengthened and healed by the toughness and tenderness she discerns in humanity’s daily rounds.

Newsday

Kingsolver’s humanity sounds the clearest note.telling us about characters in the middle of their days, who live as we really do, from one small incident of awareness to the next.

Los Angeles Times

Kingsolver is an extraordinary storyteller.

Chicago Tribune

With this dazzling array of stories, demonstrating a wide range of characterizations, settings, situations and narrative voices, Kingsolver confirms the promise of her astonishingly accomplished first novel, The Bean Trees. Most of these dozen tales ring with authentic insights, leaving the reader moved, amused or enlightened. Kingsolver's knowledge of human nature, and especially domestic relationships, is breathtaking. She is able to convey the personalities and voices of such diverse characters as a feisty union organizer of Mexican ancestry; a young girl trying to be faithful to the legacy of her Cherokee grandmother; a life-scarred ex-con determined to go straight; an upper-middle-class wife and mother on a clandestine trip to the Petrified Forest with her lover; a middle-aged man whose cherished wife gives him an intimation of her mortality; a child from a poor farming family who befriends an outcast in her Kentucky community. Among the standout stories is ``Islands on the Moon,'' in which a single mother faces her pregnancy with added exasperation because her mother--also single--will be having a baby at the same time. Propelled by fresh, breezy dialogue, funny, tender and full of surprises, the story takes a poignant turn when the mother and daughter heal their estrangement on a portentous day. If the symbolism in a few of these tales is sometimes too obvious, Kingsolver handles every other narrative device with delicacy and subtle skill. First serial to Redbook and Mademoiselle. (June)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Kingsolver (Animal Dreams, Audio Reviews, LJ 1/95) offers a dozen tales of contemporary life that focus on relationships and the fragility of life and love. The central characters are all women or young girls who are struggling to understand themselves and those they love. In the title story, a child learns from her grandmother that home is not so much a place as it is a people and their history. In the concluding story, a tough-minded crane operator leads a wildcat strike and bears the consequences of her boldness with the sort of courage and determination that she hopes to instill in her children. All these tales of love, loss, and learning are told with insight and tenderness. There is a certain oral richness to these stories that renders them ideal for the audio format. Added to that dimension is the superb storytelling of narrator Paula Parker, who enriches Kingsolver's poetic prose with a variety of accents and voices. Highly recommended for all fiction collections.--Sister M. Anna Falbo, CSSF, Villa Maria Coll. Lib., Buffalo

Library Journal

"A dazzling array of short stories . . . Kingsolver's knowledge of human nature, and especially domestic relationships, is breathtaking." — Publishers Weekly

“Read Homeland and Other Stories and you will feel glad to be alive. You are delighted by a gifted storyteller. You are strengthened and healed by the toughness and tenderness she discerns in humanity’s daily rounds.” — Newsday

“Kingsolver’s humanity sounds the clearest note.telling us about characters in the middle of their days, who live as we really do, from one small incident of awareness to the next.” — Los Angeles Times

"Extraordiarily fine . . . Kingsolver has a Chekhovian tenderness toward her characters . . . The title story is pure poetry." — Russell Banks, New York Times Book Review

“Kingsolver understands in an uncanny way the significance of the ordinary, the fleeting moment that may become lost or become catharsis. She writes with refreshing clarity, humor and honesty.” — Detroit Free Press

“Kingsolver is an extraordinary storyteller.” — Chicago Tribune

"Delightful." — New York Woman

From the Publisher