Bøger af Robert Rebein

Suitable for anyone interested in Western history, contemporary memoir, or the collision of Old and New West on the High Plains of Kansas, this book explores what it means to grow up in, leave, and return to the iconic Western town of Dodge City, Kansas.

At the long-term care facility where Robert Rebeins father lands after a horrific car crash, a shadow box hangs next to each room, its contents suggesting something of the occupants life. In Headlights on the Prairie, Rebein has created a literary shadow box of sorts, a book in which moments of singular grace and grit encapsulate a life and a world.In the tradition of memoirs such as Tobias Wolffs This Boys Life and Ivan Doigs This House of Sky, these essays bring a storytellers gifts to lifes dramas, large and small. Following his award-winning turn on his hometown of Dodge City, Rebein takes us back to the high plains world where his family has farmed and ranched since the 1920s. It is a world populated by feedlot cowboys, stock-car drivers, and farm kids dreaming of basketball glory. Here too we find the darker tales of damaged young men returning from war, long-haul truckers addicted to crystal meth, and the sadly heroic residents of a small-town nursing home grandiloquently named Manor of the Plains.Whether contemplating a fiery crash at a race track, coming to terms with an aging parent, or navigating the last days of a beloved family dog, Rebein offers a subtle, unsparing, often moving look at the moments that go into making a writer and a man. Seen in sharp detail, and recalled from a distance, his is a story of how a man can leave his home on the prairieand yet never really get out of Dodge.

Robert Rebein argues that much literary fiction of the 1980s and 90s represents a triumphant, if tortured, return to questions about place and the individual that inspired the works of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Faulkner, and other giants of American literature.