Little: Novels by Emily Anderson

"A virtuosic display of wit, humor, and surreal beauty. Like the erasures of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes and Yedda Morrison’s Darkness, Emily Anderson’s partially masticated reimaginings of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie series gets inside the logic of its source text. With uncanny insight, Little reveals what had always been simmering just beneath these novels’ familiar surfaces. (Mostly doughnuts and motherbutter.)"

—Jesse Miller, Reviews Editor, Full Stop

There’s an icloud casting shadows over Middle America but by now “the prairie's over.” Pa is the strapping advent of mono-crops, debt crisis and consumption. Ma is bone marrow and fresh eggs, embodied westward expansion. Laura is in the bank though “the bank had scalped her.” (In)dian is what is entered (in)to, “fair profit, fair skin.” Mary? Mary is “quite in.” And “there are so many ways of seeing things and so many ways of saying ‘Sioux.’”

Apple cheeked readers who curled up with Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books as children and cheered the little family and their epic industriousness, please be forewarned. Anderson’s devilish re-writing exhumes and animates a series of haunting and sometimes disturbingly funny sub-narratives. Delving deep into the American psyche, Little will leave you wondering how you missed the “Certificate to Missouri” clutched in your complicit little hand. What else have you squandered? Who else have you “loved?”

—Yedda Morrison (Author of Darkness, Crop, and Girl Scout Nation)

"I can't remember the last time I read something so familiar and unsettling - like meeting someone you love after they come back from a long journey wearing differently-colored eyes. Like if H.P. Lovecraft had had a hand in writing The Book of Common Prayer. It's playful, and frightening, and truer, somehow, than the original."

—Mallory Ortberg, Author of Texts from Jane Eyre

Come for the Michael Landon Flip Book; stay for the richly rewoven story that excavates hidden moments in Little House on the Prairie and pays playful homage to fan favorites like prairie bitch Nellie Oleson. Little is a new classic, skillfully foraging Laura Ingalls Wilder's much-loved series to create an (ir)reverent rereading that pioneers the new frontier of Little House on the Prairie in the 21st-century.

—Alison Fraser, Author of Animalia

Emily Anderson’s writing has appeared recently in Harper’s, Conjunctions, and Fence. She often collaborates with visual artists; video work created with Jen Morris has been screened in Vermont, Philadelphia, and Spain. She holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently a PhD candidate in English at the University at Buffalo.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 158 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-132-0