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Valparaiso, Round the Horn
Read just a few paragraphs and you’ll see: not much preamble is required for Madeline ffitch’s debut collection. The short stories within speak for themselves, loudly, clearly. Here you’ll find a passionate scientist studying a forgotten species of Mud Turtle, a janitor who brings up his daughter in the basement of her middle school, a construction worker who minds where he pees, and a whole lot more. Throughout, you’ll be astonished and engaged by their colloquial fluency, honest characters, and intriguing rural backdrops.
- GenresShort StoriesFiction
246 pages, Kindle Edition
First published February 1, 2015
7 people are currently reading
296 people want to read
About the author
Madeline Ffitch
8 books113 followersMadeline ffitch writes and organizes in Appalachian Ohio. She was a founding member of the punk theater company, The Missoula Oblongata, and is the author of the story collection, Valparaiso, Round the Horn. Madeline has been awarded residencies at Yaddo and at the MacDowell Colony. She is the author of Stay and Fight from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
November 4, 2014
Reading Madeline ffitch is like reading what you hoped and imagined computer games would be like when you first discovered computer games. Expansive, endlessly imaginative, so rich with internal logic that logic itself is spun into an aesthetic triumph.
This book features construction workers swimming at a YMCA, dolphin sex, wagon wheels on the bar walls, songs that have your name in them, sentences like “And each morning, I woke like a cabbage, folded way down in the pickle jar, a rat of bone and hair, wetted down” followed up by sentences like “Never like a person someone would want to stay longer in bed with, never like a person someone else would decide to ignore the alarm for.”
There are nougaty chunks of all that story stuff that dumb-dumbs think is passé: people with well-rendered mustaches, places with well-rendered naugahyde, dialogue that crinkles like a cat’s back.
If you haven’t seen the amazing plays of The Missoula Oblongata, you might not know who Madeline ffitch is, but if you own a shirt that’s 3D in any way (sequins one of many possible answers), you’ll love this book.
This book features construction workers swimming at a YMCA, dolphin sex, wagon wheels on the bar walls, songs that have your name in them, sentences like “And each morning, I woke like a cabbage, folded way down in the pickle jar, a rat of bone and hair, wetted down” followed up by sentences like “Never like a person someone would want to stay longer in bed with, never like a person someone else would decide to ignore the alarm for.”
There are nougaty chunks of all that story stuff that dumb-dumbs think is passé: people with well-rendered mustaches, places with well-rendered naugahyde, dialogue that crinkles like a cat’s back.
If you haven’t seen the amazing plays of The Missoula Oblongata, you might not know who Madeline ffitch is, but if you own a shirt that’s 3D in any way (sequins one of many possible answers), you’ll love this book.
November 5, 2014
Madeline ffitch is a natural-born storyteller. Her irresistible voice doesn’t just entertain, it illuminates life’s mysteries like a flame in a cave. No one writes like ffitch. Every paragraph is packed with guts and heart. So real and tactile are these stories that I could smell the weird smells. I saw deep into the blood bonds of family. Trust these brave narrators! Befriend thieves, crawl woods, pick fights, steal cars, study turtles, shoot guns, stay true. Personality is power in this unflinching book; nature does what it will while ffitch’s words hum with wisdom.
September 11, 2022
electric.
June 17, 2015
It’s taken me a while to write this review and these stories have grown in my mind since I read them. They are engaging, funny and a little strange, and it takes a while to absorb the complexity that underlies them.
The author has a very distinctive prose style. There is a beautiful rhythm to the writing. This hits you from the first sentence of the first story, a long, meandering statement that includes three lines of dialogue. Grammar geeks might lie awake wondering if it even is a sentence. I just wanted to keep reading and find out where it would take me.
The characters in these stories are outsiders. Sometimes they have rebelled, but often they stand apart from others without conscious choice, or even awareness. They look at the world aslant but they are rounded and real, never kooky or contrived. Their difference is echoed in the distinctive prose and the sly, surprising humour.
The narrator of “A Sow, on the Lam” is an academic monitoring the decline into extinction of a turtle so unappreciated that even her fellow marine biologists are content to let its demise pass unmarked. She is thrilled when a public radio journalist comes to cover the turtles’ story but the journalist is more interested in the pig farmers whose work is destroying the turtles’ habitat.
In “Fort Clatsop” a girl lives with her father who works at a progressive school as a janitor (or as they would have it, custodian). He tells her vivid stories about his past and rails against the “plain people”. When her teacher makes the class write about why they would like to be a janitor (custodian), the girl suddenly sees her father as others see him.
In “The Big Woman” a man is caught between worlds. He is building the dream home of an overachieving obsessive who makes him shout out what he is doing as he performs each task, in the name of productivity. He lives uneasily next to a family of thieves. All the while he is waiting for his own dream to be fulfilled by a big woman coming out of the woods.
Be warned, these stories, with their insistent rhythm and unique perspective, stay with you like a tune you can’t get out of your head.
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This review first appeared on the TNBBC blog http://thenextbestbookblog.blogspot.c...
TNBBC received a free copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review
The author has a very distinctive prose style. There is a beautiful rhythm to the writing. This hits you from the first sentence of the first story, a long, meandering statement that includes three lines of dialogue. Grammar geeks might lie awake wondering if it even is a sentence. I just wanted to keep reading and find out where it would take me.
The characters in these stories are outsiders. Sometimes they have rebelled, but often they stand apart from others without conscious choice, or even awareness. They look at the world aslant but they are rounded and real, never kooky or contrived. Their difference is echoed in the distinctive prose and the sly, surprising humour.
The narrator of “A Sow, on the Lam” is an academic monitoring the decline into extinction of a turtle so unappreciated that even her fellow marine biologists are content to let its demise pass unmarked. She is thrilled when a public radio journalist comes to cover the turtles’ story but the journalist is more interested in the pig farmers whose work is destroying the turtles’ habitat.
In “Fort Clatsop” a girl lives with her father who works at a progressive school as a janitor (or as they would have it, custodian). He tells her vivid stories about his past and rails against the “plain people”. When her teacher makes the class write about why they would like to be a janitor (custodian), the girl suddenly sees her father as others see him.
In “The Big Woman” a man is caught between worlds. He is building the dream home of an overachieving obsessive who makes him shout out what he is doing as he performs each task, in the name of productivity. He lives uneasily next to a family of thieves. All the while he is waiting for his own dream to be fulfilled by a big woman coming out of the woods.
Be warned, these stories, with their insistent rhythm and unique perspective, stay with you like a tune you can’t get out of your head.
-
This review first appeared on the TNBBC blog http://thenextbestbookblog.blogspot.c...
TNBBC received a free copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review
January 24, 2025
man this shit is so busted up, so sad and mossy, it’s like the first writer who ever found out there’s bones inside of us actually
March 10, 2015
One of my favorites collections of the year.
March 18, 2015
Everything in ffitch's writing is packed with raw, distorted beauty. This collection is vivid, humorous, and bizarre, and I couldn't get enough.
March 30, 2025
I learned of this author when I read The Best American Short Stories 2024 which had one of her stories in it. That story was not my favorite in the anthology, it wasn't even in my top 3, but she was the only author who I immediately sought out more from and I'm glad I did. This collection is bizarre and frequently off-putting in the best way. A couple of the stories were total duds, but for the most part they were uniquely compelling. What Wants to Be Shot and The Stars and Stripes Forever were my favorites. ffitch reminds me a bit of George Saunders in that you have to trust the internal logic of the story, but if you are able to go where it takes you then you're in for a hell of a ride backed up with heaps of heart.
December 30, 2017
This is my favorite contemporary book of short stories. I read LOTS of books of short stories. I've read this one three times in the year and a half since I bought it. The stories are all 80-90% based in the real world we live in, but there is always some tentacle reaching out into the magical or that-which-is-unbound-by-logical world. This book is really funny and all of its narrators are tricksters. There are amazing sentences in each and every paragraph.
A Sow on the Lam is a huge work of genius.
Activity Summer is the short story I read every time I feel like I forget how to write short stories.
A Sow on the Lam is a huge work of genius.
Activity Summer is the short story I read every time I feel like I forget how to write short stories.
September 21, 2018
A fresh stunner. Timeless, but completely of our strange moment. “Planet X” is powerful, tender & outrageous. Brought to mind “A Good Man is Hard To Find”, Salinger & George Saunders.
Also rewarding that, though there is a consistent, strong voice throughout, each story is very distinct & resonant on its own.
Very excited to hear her 1st novel will be coming out. Thank you & congratulations to Publishing Genius for putting this out.
Also rewarding that, though there is a consistent, strong voice throughout, each story is very distinct & resonant on its own.
Very excited to hear her 1st novel will be coming out. Thank you & congratulations to Publishing Genius for putting this out.
October 31, 2017
Kind of weird, kind of great short stories. I might come back and write more about this when I have the book in front of me. Another one of my favorites from Publishing Genius.
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June 7, 2019Shouting this book’s praises from the top of every roof in the world
October 27, 2023
Hard to rate. A mixed bag, but it grew on me. Each story contains a delightfully complex world.
The stories I didn’t care for were so-so, but the ones I loved, I’m still thinking about.
The stories I didn’t care for were so-so, but the ones I loved, I’m still thinking about.
January 15, 2024
Beautiful and complex.
December 30, 2025
Unexpected. Moments where you feel you can seep into the deep mud of rural America and others that make it all feel less heavy.
March 31, 2025
insaneeee collection of short stories that combine gritty realism with dreamscapes i could never hope to come up with. ffitch is a natural born storyteller whose work sneaks up on you and kidnaps you into her infinite worlds. loved it.
June 18, 2015
Sweet and unique Trinie Dalton-esque stories. Love!
December 25, 2015
I loved this book so much. Ffitch has a lifelong fan in me.
October 17, 2016
spent whole semester reading thoreau but wished i had read this instead, lots of beautiful conversation + if walt whitman had been interesting. you want to read this, really.
June 27, 2016
This is an amazing book of short stories. I loved every story in it.
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews