Sightings

<p>B. J. Hollars's debut short story collection offers ten thematically linked tales all of which are out to subvert conventional notions of the Midwestern coming-of-age story. The stories feature an assemblage of Bigfoot believers Civil War reenactors misidentified Eskimos and grief-stricken clowns among other outcasts incapable of finding a place in their worlds. In these marvelous stories we can join a family on a very 21st-century trip along the Oregon Trail watch as a boy builds a brother from a vacuum cleaner follow a sandlot baseball team as it struggles to overcome an invasion by its Native American neighbors and experience how a high school basketball squad takes to Sasquatch roaming its court. This genre-bending collection charts a bizarre pathway through the thickets of life on the road to adulthood. Pushing the limits of realism these stories capture the peculiar rites of passage of growing up Midwestern.</p>