'Great American Desert,' by Terese Svoboda '78 Finalist for the Foreword Book Award

By
Audrey Deng
April 10, 2020
'Great American Desert' book cover

Great American Desert, a collection of short stories by alumna Terese Svoboda '78, is a finalist for the Foreword Book Award.

The Foreword Book Award is awarded by Foreword Magazine, the only review journal devoted entirely to independent publishing. They exclusively cover university and independent publishers, the books they publish, and their authors.

Great American Desert was published by Mad Creek Books at the Ohio State University Press last March. The book is a collection of twenty-one short stories centering around the theme of water, and its use and abuse. According to Foreword Magazine “[Great American Desert] spans the misadventures of the prehistoric Clovis people to the wanderings of a forlorn couple around a pink pyramid in a sci-fi prairie. In her arresting and inimitable style, Svoboda’s delicate handling of the complex dynamics of family and self seeps into every sentence of these first-rate short stories about what we do to the world around us—and what it can do to us.”

The book has received critical acclaim, including from Publishers Weekly: “Svoboda’s panicked, passionate prose mirrors the excitement of their torrid, dangerous affair.”

A review on the Los Angeles Review of Books characterizes Svoboda’s prose as “meticulous and lyrical,” which achieves in “bring[ing] these stories to life in ways that are often stunning, deeply felt, and uniquely perceptive. Taken alone, these stories — some of which are flash stories clocking in under four pages — provide their own vivid snapshots of lands and people frequently in contradiction with themselves. Taken as a whole, the collection is like layers of stratum that produce a beautiful yet ominous portrait of an ecosystem that’s given more than it can sustain, and people who have taken more than they deserve.”

Karen Russell ’06, author of Swamplandia and fellow alumna calls the book “A devious and extraordinary new collection of stories from one of our best writers.”

A Guggenheim fellow, Svoboda is the author of eighteen books. She has won the Bobst Prize in fiction, the Iowa Prize for poetry, an NEH grant for translation, the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, a Jerome Foundation prize for video, the O. Henry award for the short story, a Bobst prize for the novel, and a Pushcart Prize for the essay. She is a three time winner of the New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship. This will be the second time Scoboda’s work has been nominated for a Foreword Book Award; her 2011 book Bohemian Girl was a finalist for the Historical Book of the Year.

More than 2,000 entries spread across 55 genres were submitted for consideration this year for the award. The list of finalists was determined by Foreword’s editorial team. Winners are now being decided by teams of librarian and bookseller judges from across the country.

“One of the most difficult jobs our editors have at Foreword is determining which books will move to the Finalist round of the INDIES,” said Victoria Sutherland, publisher. “We saw such impressive work this year, and it was extremely difficult to cull this list.”

“To stand out among so many wonderful submissions, a book has to be exceptional,” added Managing Editor, Michelle Anne Schingler. “We’re proud to attach our names to each and every book selected as a finalist, and we’re eager to learn how the judges received these extraordinary picks.”

Winners in each genre will be announced June 17, 2020.