The fiction of Bonnie Jo Campbell has been honored with the Pushcart Prize, the AWP Award for Short Fiction, and Southern Review's Eudora Welty Prize. In this stunning collection - a National Book Award finalist - Campbell's rural Michigan characters are both as jagged as rusty metal and as delicate as the light brush of fading dreams.
American Salvage is rich with local color and peopled with characters who love and hate extravagantly. They know how to fix cars and washing machines, how to shoot and clean game, and how to cook up methamphetamine, but they have not figured out how to prosper in the 21st century. Through the complex inner lives of working-class characters, Campbell illustrates the desperation of post-industrial America, where wildlife, jobs, and whole ways of life go extinct and the people have no choice but to live off what is left behind.