Books by B.J. Hollars

B.J. Hollars and his young son strike out on a 2,500-mile road trip to retrace the Oregon Trail. Their mission: to rediscover America—and Americans—along the way.

B. J. Hollars is author of two award-winning nonfiction books, Thirteen Loops: Race, Violence and the Last Lynching in America and Opening the Doors: The Desegregation of the University of Alabama and the Fight for Civil Rights in Tuscaloosa, as well as Sightings (IUP, 2013) and Dispatches from the Drownings: Reporting the Fiction of Nonfiction. He is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.

What have dogs done to earn the title of "man's best friend"? B.J. Hollars attempts to find out with firsthand reports recounting a range of stories revealing much about our pets-and even more about the humans who share their lives.

B. J. Hollars's debut short story collection offers ten thematically linked tales, all of which are out to subvert conventional notions of the Midwestern coming-of-age story. The stories feature an assemblage of Bigfoot believers, Civil War reenactors, misidentified Eskimos, and grief-stricken clowns, among other outcasts incapable of finding a place in their worlds. In these marvelous stories, we can join a family on a very 21st-century trip along the Oregon Trail, watch as a boy builds a brother from a vacuum cleaner, follow a sandlot baseball team as it struggles to overcome an invasion by its Native American neighbors, and experience how a high school basketball squad takes to Sasquatch roaming its court. This genre-bending collection charts a bizarre pathway through the thickets of life on the road to adulthood. Pushing the limits of realism, these stories capture the peculiar rites of passage of growing up Midwestern.