The One-room Schoolhouse — Jim Heynen

In more than one hundred perfectly pitched, sometimes perverse, and always surprising stories, Jim Heynen displays his mastery of country wisdom, speech, and behavior as he reveals life in a Midwest where electricity is a magical novelty and cities a distant rumor. These are tales of farmboys finding their way, contending with grown-ups, city kids, birth, death, bats, rats, skunks, and even mean ponies. Or choosing between corncobs and peach tissues, hurling rotten eggs, getting in trouble, helping out, and trying to conceive of the mountains and oceans and forests they've never seen. Their adventures are an education in  the natural world, as well as an aknowledgment of what is both common and strange in human nature. Whether true of just funny, sad or even magical, The One-Room Schoolhouse is indelibly American.