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Freshwater Boys is a collection of eleven short stories set in and around the Great Lakes of Michigan. The opening narratives feature adolescent or pre-adolescent boys struggling with their conceptions of manhood. They are sizing themselves up against masculine ideals, and filled with doubt and confusion regarding their own paths.

The landscapes and lakescapes serve as recurring characters in the book. The boys and men wander forests--sometimes finding tranquility, sometimes finding tragedy. They climb and descend dunes. And often, they encounter the Big Lake: Lake Michigan. The idea of a Third Coast figures prominently in the book, the lake and its horizon serving as a kind of world's end, where things pass away or come to life.

 

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About the Author

Adam Schuitema is the author of the short-story collection Freshwater Boys, forthcoming in April 2010. It will be published by Delphinium Books and distributed by HarperCollins. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous magazines, including Glimmer Train, North American Review, TriQuarterly, Black Warrior Review, and Crazyhorse. Adam earned his MFA and Ph.D. from Western Michigan University. He is an assistant professor of English at Kendall College of Art and Design in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he lives with his wife and daughter.

 

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Praise for Freshwater Boys

Freshwater Boys is filled with characters much like the lakes Schuitema writes about--dark, mysterious, and sometimes punishing, but also redemptive and forgiving. A wonderful, poignant collection of stories about men struggling to understand manhood. --Kirk Farber, author of Postcards from a Dead Girl

Michigan native Schuitema explores the lakeside life of his home state with deep enthusiasm in this debut collection, candidly recounting the passage through childhood, youth, and adulthood... the stories contain numerous moments of memorable, tension-filled sensual descriptions, as in the harrowing search for a missing boy in 'Camouflage Fall,' where the 'glacial residue glowing under a cool glacial moon' coupled with the notion that a 'flashlight seemed like a thin dagger compared to the huge chunks of darkness' stand as one of the book's many moments of crisp, effective prose." --Publishers Weekly

Michigan, the state with the largest fresh water coastline, is our Third Coast, and writers such as Ernest Hemingway and Jim Harrison have fittingly laced their Michigan stories with its rivers. Freshwater Boys, Adam Schuitema's deeply engaging first collection, extends this tradition and, in so doing, renders an American Lake Country. --Stuart Dybek

Schuitema's Freshwater Boys is the literary equivalent of an early spring leap into the still icy waters of the bay: shocking, refreshing, cleansing. --Michael Zadoorian, author of The Leisure Seeker and The Lost Tiki Palaces of Detroit (Wayne State University)

 

 

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