Buy Bad Kansas at Amazon

Bad Kansas

by Becky Mandelbaum
Get an email alert when this author’s titles go on sale!
Follow this author

Published by University of Georgia Press
The eleven stories in this Flannery O’Connor Award-winning collection explore Midwestern life “with heart and precision, and a fresh sense of humor” (Pam Houston, author of Contents May Have Shifted).

These beautifully crafted stories reveal the complicated underbelly of the country’s most flown-over state and the quirky characters that call it home. In this darkly humorous collection, Kansas becomes a state of mind as Mandelbaum’s characters struggle to define their relationship to home and what it means to stay or leave, to hold on or let go.

When a desperately lonely woman finds herself on a bad date with a rugged man, she must decide whether to sacrifice the life of a bear in order to keep the man’s affection. After having a nightmare about a mallard, a young man wakes to discover he’s choking the woman he loves. When his mother starts dating a slimy pizza parlor owner, a young boy must carefully consider his loyalties. The appealing and peculiar characters in Bad Kansas are determined to get what they want, be it love or sex or power, in a world determined to overlook them.

BUY NOW FROM

Join our community.
Great stories. Great deals. Weekly.


Good Reads

COMMUNITY REVIEWS