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Joe Wilkins's memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers, won the GLCA New Writers Award for nonfiction, and his work has appeared in the Georgia Review, the Harvard Review, and Slate, among many other periodicals. He is a Pushcart Prize winner and a finalist for the National Magazine Award and the PEN/USA Award. Wilkins lives with his wife and two children in western Oregon, where he teaches writing at Linfield College.
"Wilkins delivers a Shakespearean mix of drama and mortal danger in
crisp and beautiful language...He renders the effects of violence
and trauma on the daily machinations of human lives...The world of
the novel, rural Montana, is presented with the native realism of
someone familiar with the people, language, landscape, and
controversies of the 'way out here'...He captures the social
dynamic of communities of few people spread over many swaths of
land...This novel instills hope. Wilkins has produced a remarkable
book filled with characters who, despite their inherent differences
over how to exist on the land, remind us of the myriad reasons that
every person might be loved."--Jason Hess, The Oregonian
"Fall Back Down When I Die is a masterpiece. Lean and authentic,
this twenty-first century western captures what so many rural
Americans on the margins are feeling: righteous anger and bitter
disconnection, powerlessness and flinty pride. And yet Joe Wilkins
has endowed his unforgettable cast of characters with humanity,
gentleness, grace, and hard-won poetry. In prose as rugged and
beautiful as the story's Montana setting, Wilkins has written one
of the best novels I've read in years. An absolutely stunning book
in every way."--Nickolas Butler, author of the national bestseller
Shotgun Lovesongs
"A heart-rending tale of family, love and violence...Through these
characters, in a prose that can hum gently, then spark like a fire,
Wilkins fashions a Western fable which spirals down to a tragic
end. Following in the literary roots of Montanans Jim Harrison and
Rick Bass, Wilkins packs a lot of story and stylistic wallop into
this gripping, outstanding novel."--Kirkus Reviews (starred
review)
"A tense story delivered in sharp, evocative sentences, Fall Back
Down When I Die captures what feel like eternal tensions of land,
loyalty, and vengeance. . .Wilkins is also a talented poet, and his
sense of sound and line seeps into his prose. . .He has a fine
sense of pacing, imbuing the book's final quarter with an almost
dizzying suspense. He's at his most poetic when setting the scene
with descriptions that create a palpable atmosphere. . .These are
melodies of pain and penance -- the right song for a novel about a
riven land."--Nick Ripatrazone, National Review
"Gorgeous...Spellbinding...The land itself is almost a living
character in the book, rendered both beautiful and ominous in
Wilkins's poetic prose...A gripping debut."--Sarah Gilman, High
Country News
"In an electric narrative that busts out in a rare rural poetry
when you least expect it, this brilliant novel places red state
zeitgeist and gray wolves squarely in its sights and, in the end,
shoots both, to my grateful amazement, with deep understanding and
compassion. What a balm, Joe Wilkins's eloquent voice of mercy
calling out in the post-Western night."--David James Duncan,
National Book Award finalist and bestselling author of The Brothers
K and The River Why
"In his first novel, shorty story writer, poet, and memoirist
Wilkins writes of hardscrabble life on the northern Great Plains
with mesmerizing power, creating characters with rich if troubled
interior lives who are desperate for agency and haunted by absent
fathers. Wendell and Rowdy's slowly blossoming relationship is as
lovely and breathtaking as the book's tragic ending is inevitable
and devastating. Suffused with a sense of longing, loss, and the
desire for change -- asking deep questions about our place in the
landscape and what, if anything, we are owed -- this is a
remarkable and unforgettable first novel."--Booklist (starred
review)
"Joe Wilkins has risen to a very special peak with this
heartrending novel of hard living and lonesome hope in the vast
American landscape. I cannot praise it enough."--Luis Alberto
Urrea, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of the national
bestsellers The House of Broken Angels and The Hummingbird's
Daughter
"Joe Wilkins is a writer of great power and heart, and Fall Back
Down When I Die is a riveting and timely novel."--Jess Walter,
National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author
of Beautiful Ruins
"Montana's rugged beauty is poetically evoked in Wilkins's fine
debut. This is an accomplished first novel, notable in particular
for its strong depiction of the timeless landscape of Montana's big
sky country."--Publishers Weekly
"Nuanced and textured...Fall Back Down When I Die seeks to point a
way forward toward community and compassion, toward
understanding."--Rachel Hergett, Bozeman Daily Chronicle
"Powerful...This is a story of realistic, complex characters whose
lives intersect on a big canvas -- as big as eastern Montana...Joe
Wilkins infuses his novel with a sense of personal attachment to
both the history and current realities of life and conflict across
the vast landscape."--Mindy Cameron, Lewiston Tribune
"Stunning, haunting, and complex...Wilkins's combination of vibrant
language and characterization elevates the novel...he forces
readers to see beyond the stereotypes of rural America and embrace
the characters as sophisticated and dynamic individuals...Wilkins's
gifts as a seasoned poet and memoirist shine through in his use of
figurative language, imagery, sentence fragments, and the way he
builds up and tears down the threads of family. Fall Back Down When
I Die is a timely addition to the literature of the West. It is a
direct and unflinching representation of the way people, land,
politics, and myth tangle with each other at the beginning of the
twenty-first century."--Andrew Jones, Split Rock Review
"The lurking menaces in the lives of each character in Fall Back
Down When I Die are shadowy, elusive, and always just out of reach,
complicated by a set of decades-old, interrelated conflicts...the
oppressive poverty and hardship that lingers in the atmosphere is
palpable."--Erin H. Turner, Big Sky Journal
"The poetry of this beautiful novel isn't only in the language--and
it's certainly in that--but also in Joe Wilkins's keen
understanding of the Bull Mountains in eastern Montana, of the
people who have left their mark on the land there, or tried to
erase it, and of the mysterious complexities of the human heart
that drive us to one side of the law or the other."--Elizabeth
Crook, author of The Which Way Tree
"There isn't a wrong note in Wilkins's novel. He manages to pull
off the development of characters simultaneous with a growing sense
of unease; the storm is becoming visible on the horizon...Wilkins
is evolving into one of our best American writers."--Chris La Tray,
The Missoulian
"To read Joe Wilkins's first novel is to spend time in eastern
Montana, to feel the sharp wind cutting across the cedar ridges,
through the sagebrush and bunchgrass, kicking up dust that gathers
into grit at the corner of your eyes. It is to hear the sweet,
languid whistles of the meadowlarks in the fields. It is to feel
"the gravel and the ruts and the old cracked tires" beneath you and
to see, above you, always, the wide sky, its "whole box of colors"
and its "extravagant stars," that pull of the sublime to lift your
gaze from the intractable earth. And it is to know how hard-earned
the beauty is. Wilkins achieves a rich evocation of place through
seasoned language, tough and tender like the steak the characters
are always eating. It is a landscape where they chew on their
trouble, pick old bones, are gnawed at by their losses."--Holly
Haworth, Orion Magazine
"Wilkins's novel feels insightful amid the ongoing debate over
public land and legal rights, but it's also timeless, and it treads
the same kind of territory as writers like Kent Haruf and Ivan
Doig, digging into quiet stories of people living close to the
land."--Heather Hansman, Outside
"With a passion matched only by his compassion, Joe Wilkins has
crafted a novel that perfectly explicates the clash between the
cowboys and ranchers of the old West and the environmentalists and
seekers of the new. No polemic, Fall Back Down When I Die is
populated by vibrant characters drawn with fairness and deep heart,
boys and men, girls and women who will get under your skin and stay
there, and is full of vivid descriptions of the Montana landscape
that are spot-on and swoon-worthy. Finally, this is a book about
America: its violence, its traumas, its entitlements, and its
stultifying rage."--Pam Houston, author of the national bestsellers
Cowboys Are My Weakness and Sight Hound
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