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The Blondes of Wisconsin
Anthony Bukoski
Winner, Council for Wisconsin Writers Edna Ferber Fiction Book Award
Winner, Midwest Book Award for Fiction–Short Story/Anthology
Honoree, Society of Midland Authors Adult Fiction Award
“An outstanding collection. Though loss haunts his characters, Bukoski’s stories are about the enduring beauty of the human spirit—as delicate as a dragonfly’s wing, as indelible as the landscape of the heart. I will not soon forget them or this transcendent book.”
—Lee Zacharias, author of Across the Great Lake
Like stones cast into a river, these sixteen moving, intimate stories illuminate how devotion and degeneration ripple through a working-class Polish American community in the postindustrial Midwest. At the heart of the collection is Eddie “The Bronko” Bronkowski, a boxer with a losing record whose reputation as a human punching bag precedes him. In each of Anthony Bukoski’s rich stories, tough yet sympathetic characters—the second cook on a Great Lakes freighter, a World War II veteran, the emcee of a female boxing troupe—take all that life throws at them, protecting those around them as best they can.
In Bukoski’s interconnected tales, the heart seeks its due despite familial conflict, the challenges of maritime work, and the slow yet inexorable decline of dementia. Beautiful vignettes express transformative moments: tenderness that can turn a cardboard crown into gold and the faint ghosts of memories long forgotten. A tour-de-force, The Blondes of Wisconsin knows what love is—and what it means to lose it.
Anthony Bukoski is an award-winning writer and a fellow of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. A member of the Polish American Historical Association, he is the author of the collections Time Between Trains, Children of Strangers, and Polonaise.
Praise
“I loved this book. Bukoski is a terrific writer. These stories are absolutely original, funny, lyrical, and touching. The Superior, Wisconsin, presented by Bukoski is as varied, complex, and tragic as Joyce’s Dublin and for me opened up a world I’d never known existed.”
—David Milofsky, author of A Milwaukee Inheritance
“Bukoski never fails to deliver the characters and situations we need to be reminded of, or introduced to, or held to our faces like the mirrors that shine in many of his stories. . . . Sink into your own long-awaited reunion with Anthony Bukoski’s writing. Or meet it with wonder, for the first time. Either way, look in the mirror. Whoever you are, you are in that reflection, just as you are in these stories.”
—Polish American Studies
“Demonstrates that the creative vein Bukoski first mined in Children of Strangers can still unearth treasures. Against a bleak post-industrial backdrop, the stubborn, broken Polish Americans who feature in his stories persist and in spite of every setback continue to exude a transcendent hope.”
—The Polish Review
“Bukoski's stories excel in their palpable sense of place and of their characters' lot in life. They are painfully evocative of a once thriving region, their settings the gritty, uncelebrated places where life runs raw.”
—Star Tribune
“Take away everything else (save the Bible), and leave me a few dozen books by Walker Percy, Flannery O’Connor, Wendell Berry, John Mortimer and Anthony Bukoski, and I’ll be fine.”
—Our Sunday Visitor
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