Deb Olin Unferth's Books

Revolution

The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War

By: Deb Olin Unferth

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Revolution

The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War

By: Deb Olin Unferth

Rising literary star Deb Olin Unferth offers a new twist on the coming-of-age memoir in this utterly unique and captivating story of the year she ran away from college with her Christian boyfriend and followed him to Nicaragua to join the Sandinistas. Despite their earnest commitment to a myriad of revolutionary causes and to each other, the couple find themselves unwanted, unhelpful, and unprepared as they bop around Central America, looking for "revolution jobs." The year is 1987, a turning point in the Cold War. The East-West balance has begun to tip, although the world doesn't know it yet, especially not Unferth and her fiancé (he proposes on a roadside in El Salvador). The months wear on and cracks begin to form in their relationship: they get fired, they get sick, they run out of money, they grow disillusioned with the revolution and each other. But years later the trip remains fixed in her mind and she finally goes back to Nicaragua to try to make sense of it all. Unferth's heartbreaking and hilarious memoir perfectly captures the youthful search for meaning, and is an absorbing rumination on what happens to a country and its people after the revolution is over.

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Page Count

222

Publisher

Henry Holt and Company

Published Date

ISBN 10

1429992123

ISBN 13

9781429992121

Wait Till You See Me Dance

Stories

By: Deb Olin Unferth

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Wait Till You See Me Dance

Stories

By: Deb Olin Unferth

“Deb Olin Unferth’s stories are so smart, fast, full of heart, and distinctive in voice—each an intense little thought-system going out earnestly in search of strange new truths. What an important and exciting talent.”—George Saunders For more than ten years, Deb Olin Unferth has been publishing startlingly askew, wickedly comic, cutting-edge fiction in magazines such as Granta, Harper’s Magazine, McSweeney’s, NOON, and The Paris Review. Her stories are revered by some of the best American writers of our day, but until now there has been no stand-alone collection of her short fiction. Wait Till You See Me Dance consists of several extraordinary longer stories as well as a selection of intoxicating very short stories. In the chilling “The First Full Thought of Her Life,” a shooter gets in position while a young girl climbs a sand dune. In “Voltaire Night,” students compete to tell a story about the worst thing that ever happened to them. In “Stay Where You Are,” two oblivious travelers in Central America are kidnapped by a gunman they assume to be an insurgent—but the gunman has his own problems. An Unferth story lures you in with a voice that seems amiable and lighthearted, but it swerves in sudden and surprising ways that reveal, in terrifying clarity, the rage, despair, and profound mournfulness that have taken up residence at the heart of the American dream. These stories often take place in an exaggerated or heightened reality, a quality that is reminiscent of the work of Donald Barthelme, Lorrie Moore, and George Saunders, but in Unferth’s unforgettable collection she carves out territory that is entirely her own.

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Page Count

201

Published Date

ISBN 10

1555977685

ISBN 13

9781555977689

Vacation

By: Deb Olin Unferth

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Vacation

By: Deb Olin Unferth

An “enthralling headscratcher of a first novel . . . weaves an intricate tale of quests and escapes” as a man follows his wife who follows a mysterious stranger (Publishers Weekly). Deb Olin Unferth’s award-winning debut novel is “an off-kilter ode to obsession” with a “richly textured, often surprising linguistic landscape” (The Rumpus). In it, a man named Myers has noticed that his wife has suddenly become suspiciously absent in the evenings. He decides to start following her on her evening escapades, hoping to discover her betrayal. Instead, he soon discovers she is following a man named Gray, who happens to be a former classmate of Myers, and whose own marriage is falling apart. What follows is an unusual, unsettling, and wildly entertaining novel by the acclaimed author of Minor Robberies. With deadpan humor and skewed wordplay, Deb Olin Unferth weaves a mystery of hope and heartbreak. Winner of the Cabell First Novel Award.

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Page Count

191

Publisher

Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Published Date

ISBN 10

0802197876

ISBN 13

9780802197870

Barn 8

A Novel

By: Deb Olin Unferth

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Barn 8

A Novel

By: Deb Olin Unferth

An unforgettably exuberant and potent novel by a writer at the height of her powers Two auditors for the U.S. egg industry go rogue and conceive a plot to steal a million chickens in the middle of the night—an entire egg farm’s worth of animals. Janey and Cleveland—a spirited former runaway and the officious head of audits—assemble a precarious, quarrelsome team and descend on the farm on a dark spring evening. A series of catastrophes ensues. Deb Olin Unferth’s wildly inventive novel is a heist story of a very unusual sort. Swirling with a rich array of voices, Barn 8 takes readers into the minds of these renegades: a farmer’s daughter, a former director of undercover investigations, hundreds of activists, a forest ranger who suddenly comes upon forty thousand hens, and a security guard who is left on an empty farm for years. There are glimpses twenty thousand years into the future to see what chickens might evolve into on our contaminated planet. We hear what hens think happens when they die. In the end the cracked hearts of these indelible characters, their earnest efforts to heal themselves, and their radical actions will lead them to ruin or revelation. Funny, whimsical, philosophical, and heartbreaking, Barn 8 ultimately asks: What constitutes meaningful action in a world so in need of change? Unferth comes at this question with striking ingenuity, razor-sharp wit, and ferocious passion. Barn 8 is a rare comic-political drama, a tour de force for our time.

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Page Count

266

Publisher

Graywolf Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

164445114X

ISBN 13

9781644451144

I, Parrot

A Graphic Novel

By: Deb Olin Unferth

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I, Parrot

A Graphic Novel

By: Deb Olin Unferth

[Unferth's] language is sly and bitterly funny, matched in mood by Haidle’s monochromatic, inkwash–style artwork, which plays up the story’s whimsy as well as its sadness." —The New York Times Book Review Daphne is willing to risk everything to get her son back. Surreal, funny and deeply affecting, I, Parrot is the tale of mother, a son, forty–two endangered parrots, and a fierce search for redemption and a "freer world." When Daphne loses custody of her son, she is willing to do whatever it takes to get him back—even if it means enlisting the help of the wayward love of her life, a trio of housepainters, a flock of passenger pigeons, a landlady from hell, a super–sized bag of mite–killing powder, and more parrots than she knows what to do with. I, Parrot, by acclaimed author Deb Olin Unferth with stunning illustrations by artist Elizabeth Haidle, dips into the surreal with poignancy and humor. In this riveting, funny, and tragic graphic novel, Daphne must risk everything. Her quest is ultimately a tale about civilization’s decline, the heartbreak of extinction, and the redemption found in individual revolution. “A lovingly crafted world of gray, at once complex and weightless.” —Roman Muradov, author of Lost and Found

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Page Count

158

Publisher

Catapult

Published Date

ISBN 10

1936787660

ISBN 13

9781936787661

Revolution

The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War

By: Deb Olin Unferth

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Revolution

The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War

By: Deb Olin Unferth

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Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

222

Publisher

Henry Holt and Company

Published Date

ISBN 10

1429992123

ISBN 13

9781429992121

Wait Till You See Me Dance

Stories

By: Deb Olin Unferth

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Wait Till You See Me Dance

Stories

By: Deb Olin Unferth

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Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

201

Published Date

ISBN 10

1555977685

ISBN 13

9781555977689

Barn 8

A Novel

By: Deb Olin Unferth

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Barn 8

A Novel

By: Deb Olin Unferth

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Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

266

Publisher

Graywolf Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

164445114X

ISBN 13

9781644451144

Vacation

By: Deb Olin Unferth

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Vacation

By: Deb Olin Unferth

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Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

189

Publisher

Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Published Date

ISBN 10

0802197876

ISBN 13

9780802197870

I, Parrot

A Graphic Novel

By: Deb Olin Unferth

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I, Parrot

A Graphic Novel

By: Deb Olin Unferth

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Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

158

Publisher

Catapult

Published Date

ISBN 10

1936787660

ISBN 13

9781936787661

Elegies for Uncanny Girls

By: Jennifer Colville

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Elegies for Uncanny Girls

By: Jennifer Colville

Unsettling and perceptive, these short stories challenge American girlhood in all its delusions, conflicting messages, and treacherous terrain. Wide- and wise-eyed, mysterious girls leave their realities behind for strange and slightly unreal places at the edges of the country. Alternatively they hover over their Midwestern homes in interior worlds of their own creation. The stories in Elegies for Uncanny Girls stand at a boundary where both the girls' bodies and their tales are either their own or laid claim to by the culture and characters that surround them. A young woman whose body continually shrinks and expands moves to Los Angeles to make a movie about tragic merpeople; bewildered and seeking guidance, a new mom strikes up a conversation with a woman with detachable hands; and spurred on by a new ally who might just be a figment of her imagination, a girl decides she can choose her own friends.

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Age

Page Count

126

Publisher

Break Away Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

0253024293

ISBN 13

9780253024299

Book's by Deb Olin Unferth

Revolution

Revolution

Wait Till You See Me Dance

Wait Till You See Me Dance

Vacation

Vacation

Barn 8

Barn 8

I, Parrot

I, Parrot

Revolution

Revolution

Wait Till You See Me Dance

Wait Till You See Me Dance

Barn 8

Barn 8

Vacation

Vacation

I, Parrot

I, Parrot

Elegies for Uncanny Girls

Elegies for Uncanny Girls

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