Silver Medal for the 2023 Will Rogers Medallion AwardNamed a 2022 Great Group ReadsIn late fall of 1892 outlaw Eddie Mole gallops down the main street of Jericho Springs, Kansas, where he robs and shoots dead the freighter Barney Kreider. Some urge Barney’s son Ulysses (“Euly”) to take revenge, but Euly is a Mennonite and Mennonites don’t seek revenge. Instead, Euly plots how to make his fortune with the aid of his half-Osage sister, Kate, and his friend Joh...

These twelve stories reflect the combat infantry experience of the Vietnam War--in the gritty “Tanks,” “Called of God,” and “Incubation Period.” There’s also the woman’s perspective of Arlene, a naive Red Cross volunteer or “Doughnut Dolly,” in “A Man’s World.” Mort captures veterans’ experiences in “Rest Stop,” a woeful, divorced man’s tale; “Hallelujah By and By,” a dark, almost supernatural story set in the Arkansas Ozarks; and “Behind Enemy Lines,” the story of a homeless, damaged man ...

In late fall of 1892 outlaw Eddie Mole gallops down the main street of Jericho Springs, Kansas, where he robs and shoots dead the freighter Barney Kreider. Some urge Barney's son Ulysses (“Euly”) to take revenge, but Euly is a Mennonite and Mennonites don't seek revenge. Instead, Euly plots how to make his fortune with the aid of his half-Osage sister, Kate, and his friend Johnny, an Osage farmhand. The three make a plan to sell goods and livestock to the settlers converging on Caldwell, K...

John Mort’s compelling first novel embodies both the Vietnam combat experience and the sad aftermath for those who underwent it. Alternating between “stateside” chapters after the war and the Vietnam chapters dramatizing it, the novel creates a tension back and forth in time as well as geography. We participate in the trauma of combat in crisp and authentic detail, and we witness the effect of that experience on “Irish” Donnelly, a bookish, reluctant soldier, and his fellow infantrymen in ...