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Donna Baier Stein
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Scenes from the Heartland: Stories Based on Lithographs by Thomas Hart Benton Kindle Edition

by Donna Baier Stein (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 62 ratings
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When a contemporary writer turns her imagination loose inside the images of an iconic artist of the past, the result is storytelling magic at its best. Here are nine tales that bring to vivid life the early decades of the 20th century as witnessed by one of America's most well-known painters. Thomas Hart Benton sketched fiddlers and farm wives, preachers and soldiers, folks gathering in dance halls and tent meetings. Though his lithographs depict the past, the real-life people he portrayed face issues that are front and center today: corruption, women's rights, racial inequality. In these stories we enter the imagined lives of Midwesterners in the late 1930s and early 1940s. A mysterious woman dancing to fiddle music makes one small gesture of kindness that helps heal the rift of racial tensions in her small town. A man leaves his childhood home after a tragic accident and becomes involved with the big-time gamblers who have made Hot Springs, Arkansas, their summer playground. After watching her mother being sent to an insane asylum simply for grieving over a miscarriage, a girl determines to never let any man have any say over her body.Then as now, Americans have struggled with poverty, illness, and betrayal. These fictions reveal our fellow countrymen and women living with grace and strong leanings toward virtue, despite the troubles that face them.
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  1. Print length
    122 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Sticky notes
    On Kindle Scribe
  4. Publication date
    March 30, 2019
  5. File size
    5003 KB
  6. Page Flip
    Enabled
  7. Word Wise
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  8. Enhanced typesetting
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Editorial Reviews

Review

To read this book is to be transported, by Baier Stein's masterful storytelling, to the American heartland of a bygone era. I, for one, did not want to leave.
--Will Allison, Editor at One Story and Author of What You Have Left and Long Drive Home

About the Author

In addition to Scenes from the Heartland, Donna is the author of The Silver Baron's Wife (PEN/New England Discovery Award, Bronze winner in Foreword Reviews 2017 Book of the Year Award, Will Rogers Medallion Award and Paterson Prize for Fiction, more), Sympathetic People (Iowa Fiction Award Finalist and 2015 Next Generation Indie Book Award Finalist), Sometimes You Sense the Difference (chapbook), and Letting Rain Have Its Say (poetry book). She was a Founding Editor of Bellevue Literary Review and founded and publishes Tiferet Journal.She has received a Bread Loaf Scholarship, Johns Hopkins University MFA Fellowship, grants from the New Jersey Council on the Arts and Poetry Society of Virginia, a Scholarship from the Summer Literary Seminars, and more.
Donna's writing has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Saturday Evening Post, Writer's Digest, Confrontation, Prairie Schooner, New York Quarterly, Washingtonian, New Ohio Review, and many other journals as well as in the anthologies I've Always Meant to Tell You (Pocket Books) and To Fathers: What I've Never Said (featured in O Magazine).
Donna was also an award-winning copywriter for Smithsonian, Time, World Wildlife Fund, The Nature Conservancy, and many other clients in the direct marketing industry. donnabaierstein.com

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07NX22P8H
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Serving House Books (March 30, 2019)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 30, 2019
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 5003 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 122 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 62 ratings

About the author

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Donna Baier Stein

Donna Baier Stein

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Donna Baier Stein is the author of The Silver Baron's Wife (PEN/New England Discovery Award, Bronze Winner Foreword reviews 2017 Book of the Year in General Fiction and Finalist Historical Fiction, and Finalist in Paterson Prize for Fiction), Sympathetic People (Iowa Fiction Award Finalist and 2015 Next Generation Indie Book Awards Finalist in Short Fiction), and Sometimes You Sense the Difference (poetry chapbook). She was a Founding Editor of Bellevue Literary Review and founded and publishes Tiferet Journal. She has received a Scholarship from Bread Loaf, a Fellowship from the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars, four Pushcart nominations, runnerup status from the 2017 Saturday Evening Post fiction contest, and prizes from the Allen Ginsberg Awards and elsewhere. Her writing has appeared in Writer’s Digest, Virginia Quarterly Review, New York Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Confrontation, Gargoyle, and many other journals and anthologies. Donna was also an award-winning copywriter for Smithsonian, Time, World Wildlife Fund, The Nature Conservancy, and many other clients in the direct marketing industry. www.donnabaierstein.com

Customer reviews

4.7 out of 5 stars
4.7 out of 5
62 global ratings
Gorgeous and Enlightening!
4 Stars
Gorgeous and Enlightening!
Do you guys have any hobbies (other than reading of course!) that you love?I’ve been a doodler since I was little, it was a big reason I went to art school and pursued a career in design. I’ve always had a love of art and culture and was thrilled to receive this book of short stories based on lithographs by the beloved artist Thomas Hart Benton.I immediately pulled out all my college art books to have the paintings vividly brought to life around me, to supplement the beautiful imagery that is also provided throughout the book, as I read these incredible stories Donna Baier Stein has dreamed up. She fabricates the most vivid narratives to paint a picture of what life was like in the early 1900’s midwest - they come to life before our eyes and transport us to a time of racial inequality, war and suffering, poverty and illness.How often have you seen a painting or a sculpture and wish you know the story behind it? You can search a portraits eyes and wish for a glint of what is going on in their mind, or wonder about a composition and what the artist was thinking as they compiled their thoughts and visions to canvas? These 9 stories, based on 9 of Benton’s lithographs transports you right into the heart of the art, and you’ll want to stay there.This collection warmed my artist heart and also made me realize how art can be so subjective and personal. And also how different life was back then, but how all the struggles seem all too familiar present day.
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Top reviews from the United States

Susan Tepper
5.0 out of 5 stars An Utterly Thrilling Read
Reviewed in the United States on April 17, 2019
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In her new story collection SCENES FROM THE HEARTLAND, author Donna Baier Stein has created fictional histories out of her own imagination and perspective, based on lithographs by American artist Thomas Hart Benton. Each of the ten lyrical stories opens with a particular lithograph by the artist and is a jumping off point for that story. As a fan of Hart Benton's work, I found this book an utterly thrilling read. Baier Stein is a precise writer with a wide lens. In this earlier period of America, in the heartland, the author takes us beyond the boundaries of the canvas, into places perhaps even Hart Benton didn't foresee with such depth of scope. From 'Trouble at the Dance Hall' (also the book cover image): "A lifelong resident of Pangburn's shantytown, Rufus had always known how narrow-minded his rich white neighbors were... Just last month, a black laborer had been killed by farmworkers and someone had posted a sign over on Route 10 warning Negroes to be out of town by sundown... Rufus' stomach clenched thinking how he had nowhere else to go... he would stay in his shack even if they had to burn it down around him... To settle himself, he turned his attention back to the music.: Hi-diddy-O-diddy- diddy-I-day... As he played and sang, Rufus watched the blond woman [Maisie] still dancing in the middle of the room... As Rufus came to the last stanza of 'Sourwood Mountain,' Maisie caught him staring..." No spoiler alert: There is much more to this story. Each one is a gem of a different cut and hue. Most highly recommended.
2 people found this helpful
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SAE
4.0 out of 5 stars Ekphrastic - a verbal descriptionof a work of art. Who knew?
Reviewed in the United States on June 30, 2021
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I was drawn to this book because I live in Kansas and am familiar with Thomas Heart Benton. Somewhat like an Art Appreciation Class, the author creates 9 stories based on the artists lithographs. She portrays an historically accurate description of life in the mid 1900’s.
I read the book and then reread it. Reflecting back, we still have many of the same social problems today.
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Linda Cutting
5.0 out of 5 stars Heartfelt Stories from the Heartland
Reviewed in the United States on April 22, 2019
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Donna Baier Stein has an uncanny ear for the voices of characters from another time and place. SCENES FROM THE HEARTLAND, Baier Stein’s collection of stories based on lithographs of Thomas Hart Benton, was difficult to put down. What begins as an ekphrastic leap into each of the nine lithographs, inhabited for a frozen moment by the characters in the artwork, becomes nine fully realized vivid worlds beyond the images.
Most of the stories are set in the south, but the ones set in Arkansas rang so true for this reader that they conjured up the very world my parents and grandparents had lived in Hot Springs. Baier Stein shines a light on the gangster world there that was the story no one in my family every talked about. It was like entering the dark, forbidden world of Al Capone, and finding real, sympathetic people who you couldn’t stop caring about, the stories I’d never heard as a kid but had always wanted to hear.
But there’s so much more here—whether it’s a young girl whose mother is sent away to a mental asylum for sadness over a miscarriage, or an African American fiddler who is beaten up for no other reason than his race and his ability to make people dance, or a church divided down the middle by states whose feuding members share the possible loss of sons, Baier Stein’s stories will draw you into the heart of each one. She also has a gift for getting her characters as well as her narrative voice to realistically reveal another era—the heartland during the 1930’s and 40’s—and you appreciate Benton’s lithographs all the more for the stories that they inspired in Baier Stein’s fruitful imagination.
3 people found this helpful
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Joann Dunham
5.0 out of 5 stars An Imaginative and Beautifully Written Collection
Reviewed in the United States on January 11, 2022
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I rarely read short stories, but I am so glad I read these! Donna Baier Stein has taken inspiration from Thomas Hart Benton’s gorgeous lithographs to create stories that take us back in time but still resonate today. She writes in a way that makes her characters come alive as they struggle with disasters, prejudices, loneliness, and loves lost. I thought her stories were haunting, rich in detail, and thought-provoking!
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Amazon Customer
4.0 out of 5 stars This author does her research
Reviewed in the United States on December 2, 2019
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Margaret Dumas Donna Baier Stein I like the attention you've paid to the mores, morals, nuances, and language used during the times you're writing about, Donna Baier Stein. The depression and early WW II years. That's so important in period writing. Without attention to those details I find it hard to believe fiction writing, and when I can't believe it then I put it down because I'm really more of a non-fiction reader.
2 people found this helpful
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Julie F. Maloney
5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful Writing, Beautiful Stories
Reviewed in the United States on April 14, 2019
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When Donna Baier Stein decided to write stories based on the lithographs by the noted artist, Thomas Hart Benton, I wonder if she thought of the challenges ahead. In her new collection, nothing seems to have stopped her. Whatever challenges she might have faced, have left no footprint on the page. Stein's writing is exquisite. Her immediacy into story might just take your breath away. Her characters are so vivid so quickly that the only disappointment is that the reader has to let them go when the scene ends. I could have stayed longer with so many of them. This is a good thing. Stein left me feeling as if I had met an entire new universe in the rural west.
3 people found this helpful
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Lynne R.
5.0 out of 5 stars The heart of America brought to you by a wonderful writer!
Reviewed in the United States on June 20, 2020
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I started reading a story a night from Donna Baier Stein’s Scenes from the Heartland - what a delightful book! She captures mid-century life in the rural Midwest beautifully! Wonderful storytelling built around the art of Thomas Hart Benton - I highly recommend it.
One person found this helpful
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Roma ABradley
4.0 out of 5 stars Very good job!
Reviewed in the United States on March 20, 2020
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Enjoyed the stories, the author did a wonderful job relating the story to the paintings of Thomas Hart Benton. Recommend to readers of short stories.
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