FICTION | AVAILABLE NOW
PALE HARVEST
A Novel
by BRADEN HEPNER
“Dazzlingly laconic, making poetry of the sheer sweat and physicality of everyday life in a worn–out landscape.”
—LIBRARY JOURNAL, starred review
Cover photo by Braden Hepner
Working a dying trade in a dead town, dairy farmer Jack Selvedge finds his life and existence stagnant. When Rebekah Rainsford moves back to town on the run from her father, her dark history consumes him. It soon becomes clear why girls like her don’t stay in towns like these, as elements of humanity in ruin culminate in tragedy. A deeply written and deeply felt story of love, depravity, and shattered ideals, Pale Harvest examines the loss of beauty, purity, and simplicity within the mindset of the rural American West.
September 2014 | Fiction | 9781937226398 | 366 pp | $16.95
"Hepner has put in the daily work with this fine novel, its keen words and sentences furrowed like lines eye-measured and trued on a far dying tree in the distance across the alkaline fields of northern Utah.”
—15 BYTES
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BRADEN HEPNER graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2009 and currently lives in Idaho with his wife and son. This is his first novel.
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BEFORE US LIKE A LAND OF DREAMS
Before Us Like a Land of Dreams follows a disheartened mother traveling an evocative route through the arid West. As her narration fades, the ancestral dead speak directly: a ragged Mormon boy yearns after a Shoshone family. A defeated polygamous wife shuts her mouth for good. A hoarder's queer son demolishes the artifacts of his lonely Idaho childhood. Descendants of British squatters sustain family delusions until a devastating suicide shatters their royal dreams. An elite colonial clan gradually awakens to the stark blue of the Great Salt Lake. The dead yield no answers, but they conjure vivid mortal moments set in iconic—and diminishing—American places.
"Anderson's keen prose shreds the myths of American history…you will find, in Anderson's vision, a stark and truthful reckoning with white legacies."
—MICHAEL WALSH, author of The Dirt Riddles
PRAISE FOR PALE HARVEST
15 Bytes Book Award Winner
“Hepner’s stunning debut novel is an homage to the barren landscape of the American West . . . a meditation on the nature of hope and self-determination, a sweeping elegy to a dying town and to the bond between blood and earth.”
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY (starred review)
“Pale Harvest is a dark novel by a deft storyteller.”
—HIGH COUNTRY NEWS
“[A]n unforgettable literary blast. . . . Hepner’s characters are among the most compelling to be experienced in contemporary fiction. . . . Readers will be moved by the author’s poetic rendition of the land’s unique topography that inflames, confounds, and rarely satisfies one’s personal hunger for carving out a meaningful and happy life.”
—THE UTAH REVIEW
“Hepner has put in the daily work with this fine novel, its keen words and sentences furrowed like lines eye-measured and trued on a far dying tree in the distance across the alkaline fields of northern Utah.”
—15 BYTES
“A deeply moving and intellectually profound novel built on the iconic myth of the American West. Think McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show or Horseman, Pass By. . . . Hepner draws a narrative exploring the existential angst smoldering in the rural West as family farmers who hold stewardship of the land confront social and economic conditions beyond their control. A bravura debut.”
—KIRKUS REVIEWS (starred review)
“Dazzlingly laconic, making poetry of the sheer sweat and physicality of everyday life in a worn–out landscape.”
—LIBRARY JOURNAL (starred review)
"Hepner is a master storyteller, a craftsman of the first order, and a fine new talent. His Western Realism is a refreshing jolt, a throwback to Steinbeck and Stegner with its own stamp of uniqueness."
—ANTHONY SWOFFORD, author of Jarhead
"Hepner's starkly poetic voice leads us into the lives of characters torn between the imagined glories of the infinite and the raw realities of hard labor here on earth."
—SCOTT SPENCER, author of Man in the Woods
