num_pages: 319
description: Like Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood and Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg Ohio  Brian Doyle's stunning fiction debut brings a town to life through the jumbled lives and braided stories of its people. In a small fictional town on the Oregon coast there are love affairs and almost-love-affairs mystery and hilarity bears and tears brawls and boats a garrulous logger and a silent doctor rain and pain Irish immigrants and Salish stories mud and laughter. There's a Department of Public Works that gives haircuts and counts insects a policeman addicted to Puccini a philosophizing crow beer and berries. An expedition is mounted a crime committed and there's an unbelievably huge picnic on the football field. Babies are born. A car is cut in half with a saw. A river confesses what it's thinking. . . It's the tale of a town written in a distinct and lyrical voice and readers will close the book more than a little sad to leave the village of Neawanaka on the wet coast of Oregon beneath the hills that used to boast the biggest trees in the history of the world.
language: English
title: Mink River
publisher: Oregon State University Press