About the Author

Recent books by Melanie Rae Thon include The Voice of the River and In This Light: New and Selected Stories. She is also the author of the novels Sweet Hearts, Meteors in August, and Iona Moon and the story collections Girls in the Grass and First, Body. Thon’s work has been included in Best American Short Stories, three Pushcart Prize anthologies, and O. Henry Prize Stories. She is a recipient of a Whiting Writer’s Award, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers Association Reading the West Book Award, the Gina Berriault Award, the Utah Book Award, and a writer’s residency from the Lannan Foundation. In 2009, she was the Virgil C. Aldrich fellow at the Tanner Humanities Center.

Reviews

"Melanie Rae Thon belts out her stories in a tone and style reminiscent of classic blues singers. . . . The reader is swept along not only by her remarkable characterizations, but also by the taut, magic current of her prose, which carries an exhilarating rhythmic punch."
--New York Times Book Review "The rhythmic beauty of Thon's writing is everywhere extraordinary: Here is a writer who can really sing the blues."--Kirkus

"Thon, like no one else alive, captures the pain and the ecstasy of our existence, its harrowing, too-often brutal nature, and the transcendent joy of soil and souls, making sense of the urge to hurt and the will to rescue, the unbearable loneliness and the solace that makes life bearable. Her slender volumes speak volumes about humanity in all its agony and its undying glory."
--The Inkslinger

"[Thon] is a writer worth reading for her soulfulness and her sensual detail."--San Francisco Chronicle"The reader is made constantly aware that language, not story, is the irreducible medium of fiction, that 'what happened' is only the beginning of the explorations a work of fiction might make. Thon is interested in the long reach of events, the mental afterimages they leave, the attempt to reckon with their consequences."--Full Stop