Fiction

Half the Terrible Things is an intimate and sometimes violent novel portraying three interconnected lives. Based on true events, the life of Martin Tabert is short and tragic. Tabert is a young farm boy from Munich, North Dakota. While traveling around the country in 1922, he is pulled off a train near Tallahassee, Florida, charged with vagrancy, sentenced to a convict work camp, and whipped to death by the camp “Whipping Boss.” His body is buried in an unknown location in wild swamp country. Eighty years later, his girlfriend, Edna, nearing her end in a nursing home in Devils Lake, ND, asks her granddaughter, Nicole, to find his grave. Nicole, a young attorney with the U.S. Justice Department in Washington, D.C., searches the Florida swamps while struggling with her own guilt stemming from her work at the Justice Department post 9/11. The Tabert case resulted in prison reform in Florida after North Dakotans intervened following Tabert’s death. 

Although Home River is a work of fiction, readers should not underestimate the great amount of historicity therein. Rodney Nelson has captured in carefully honed language the distinctive lilt of Norwegian-American dialect and the political and social atmosphere of the Red River Valley of the North in the middle 1940s. By imagining one small episode from that era, he achieves an authenticity of voice and color which might not have been possible in a strict recounting or memoir. Rodney Nelson has studied the valley for most of his life; his novels, stories and books of poems reflect his clear-eyed, unsentimental love for this rich land and difficult climate, and for the equally complex people who chose to settle the area, his grandparents among them. Home River is first of all a work of fiction whose intent is simply to please-but one of the many other things the book does is to help us preserve our knowledge of the immigrant pioneering spirit as manifested in the settlers of the Red River Valley and their children.

Preceded by 20 pages of historical context, This Could Have Been a Simple Story is a glimpse of pop culture, popular lyrics, sexual identities, & transition in the Balkans. The protagonist is old enough to remember the war, exile, and poverty, but also young enough to get information about socialism from others while enjoying her sophisticated gadgets and fusion food. Simple Story is timely in the context of the many Bosnian refugees who have immigrated to the plains. Author: Ajla Terzic, Translator: John K. Cox

2018 Midwest Book Awards Finalist for Fiction--Literary/Contemporary/Historical
2018 Independent Press Award, Distinguished Favorite, LGBTQ Fiction

A work of fiction for young readers. Set in North Dakota in the 1930s, its protagonist is a Norwegian farm girl, Tori, whose mother is a widow. When a Norwegian bachelor-farmer begins courting Mama, Tori writes in her journal that her life is about to be ruined.

By: Margo Sorenson.

Radium is about two bad-luck brothers from a bad-luck town in the flat farmland of western Minnesota. Jim, the narrator, is fifteen and damaged, the result of a car accident years before that left him with a head injury and a tweaked view of the world. He sees his big brother, Billy Quinn, in near mythic terms. Billy is wild and strong and capable of things other men are not.

They live together in a trailer house on the ditch-side of a beet field until Billy gets into bad trouble, and then they go on the run. That’s what wild young men like Billy—growing up rangy and unsupervised in the desperate middle of this country—do when trouble comes. They run. They drive cars fast. They go west. They live on the lam, always about three days from a federal manhunt.

Laws are broken, but with an older brother his only true friend on earth—a brother he loves more than his own next breath—Jim justifies their deeds, willing to do . . . anything . . . to keep Billy free.

Hardcover, 400 pages

Follow this link for a splendid, intellectual interview with John about writing and Radium.