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Baylor BU English Faculty Publications Elegy on Kinderklavier
  • Publications
    • Literacy in a Long Blues Note
    • Modernity, Community, and Place in Brian Friel's Drama
    • A Fire to Light Our Tongues
    • Hollow Palaces
    • Haunted Property
    • American Literary Cultures
    • Sacred Rhetorical Education in 19th Century America
    • Modernism in the Green
    • A Long, Long Way
    • Hope and Aesthetic Utility in Modernist Literature
    • The Courage to See
    • The Evil Twins of American Television
    • Harvest Bells
    • Letters of a Long Name
    • Constructing Nineteenth-Century Religion
    • Reforming Women
    • Thomas Hoccleve
    • Mark Twain Under Fire
    • Building Natures
    • Understanding Marilynne Robinson
    • Living with the Living Dead
    • The Life Group
    • Then Winter
    • Building Jerusalem
    • The Divine Face in Four Writers
    • Seamus Heaney: An Introduction
    • Imagined Spiritual Communities in Britain's Age of Print
    • Housework and Gender in American Television
    • The Boke of the Cyte of Ladyes
    • Entertaining Judgment
    • Seamus Heaney's Regions
    • Elegy on Kinderklavier
    • Tracing Southern Storytelling in Black and White
    • Mapping Christian Rhetorics
    • The Tulip-Flame
    • The Glyph and the Gramophone
    • The Prodigal
    • Beyond the Pulpit
    • The Reconstruction of Mark Twain
    • Sylvia Plath's Fiction

Elegy on Kinderklavier

Arna Bontemps Hemenway, Associate Professor of English

Winner of the 2015 PEN/Hemingway Award

Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers 2014 Pick

The stories in Elegy on Kinderklavier explore the profound loss and intricate effects of war on lives that have been suddenly misaligned. A diplomat navigates a hostile political climate and an arranged marriage in an Israeli settlement on a newly discovered planet; a small town in Kansas shuns the army recruiter who signed up its boys as troops are deployed to Iraq, falling in helicopters and on grenades; a family dissolves around mental illness and a child's body overtaken by cancer. In the lead story, the moment a soldier steps on an explosive device is miraculously and painfully reproduced, nanosecond by nanosecond. We feel each click and trigger of the metal below his feet, the compression of his toes, and the fading of the sky around him. Arna Bontemps Hemenway's stories feel pulled out of time and place, and the suffering of his characters seem at once otherworldly and stunningly familiar. Elegy on Kinderklavier is a disquieting exploration of what it is to lose and be lost.

Sarabande Books, 2014

ISBN 9781936747764


"In this impressive debut story collection, Hemenway shows a depth of emotion and intensity that carries the reader from start to finish. These haunting stories deserve a wide audience." —Library Journal, starred review

"Death is an imminent, lurking presence in this debut collection of seven stories, which explore the confluence of fate and circumstance that places men in situations of anguish and despair. . . In 'The Half Moon Martyrs' Brigade of New Jerusalem, Kansas' and Army recruited is blamed for the mortality rate of his town's soldiers in Iraq. Hemenway's earnest desire to reflect historical forces that tragically impact individual lives is admirable." —Publishers Weekly

“A mother discovers, to her horror, that she cannot muster unconditional love for her 8-year-old son, disfigured out of all recognition by a terminal brain tumor, and disappears on a long trip, leaving the boy’s father by the hospital bedside. . . . shows Hemenway to be a true writer, bearing witness.” —Kirkus Review

English

College of Arts & Sciences

Carroll Science 106

Department of English
One Bear Place, #97404
Waco, TX 76798-7404

(254) 710-1768
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Baylor BU English Faculty Publications Elegy on Kinderklavier
  • About Us
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      • Career Possibilities
      • Courses Offered
      • Degree Plan
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    • Professional Writing & Rhetoric
      Back
      • Courses Offered
      • Degree Plan
      • Internships
    • Creative Writing Minor
    • Scholarships
    • Student Awards
      Back
      • Past Winners
  • Graduate
    Back
    • M.A. Policies and Procedures
    • Ph.D. Policies and Procedures
    • Certificate in Literature & Religion
    • English Graduate Student Association (EGSA)
    • Graduate Opportunities
      Back
      • Past Winners
    • Graduate Travel Funding
  • Faculty
    Back
    • Publications
      Back
      • Literacy in a Long Blues Note
      • Modernity, Community, and Place in Brian Friel's Drama
      • A Fire to Light Our Tongues
      • Hollow Palaces
      • Haunted Property
      • American Literary Cultures
      • Sacred Rhetorical Education in 19th Century America
      • Modernism in the Green
      • A Long, Long Way
      • Hope and Aesthetic Utility in Modernist Literature
      • The Courage to See
      • The Evil Twins of American Television
      • Harvest Bells
      • Letters of a Long Name
      • Constructing Nineteenth-Century Religion
      • Reforming Women
      • Thomas Hoccleve
      • Mark Twain Under Fire
      • Building Natures
      • Understanding Marilynne Robinson
      • Living with the Living Dead
      • The Life Group
      • Then Winter
      • Building Jerusalem
      • The Divine Face in Four Writers
      • Seamus Heaney: An Introduction
      • Imagined Spiritual Communities in Britain's Age of Print
      • Housework and Gender in American Television
      • The Boke of the Cyte of Ladyes
      • Entertaining Judgment
      • Seamus Heaney's Regions
      • Elegy on Kinderklavier
      • Tracing Southern Storytelling in Black and White
      • Mapping Christian Rhetorics
      • The Tulip-Flame
      • The Glyph and the Gramophone
      • The Prodigal
      • Beyond the Pulpit
      • The Reconstruction of Mark Twain
      • Sylvia Plath's Fiction
  • Organizations
    Back
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    • 20CRS
    • House of Poetry
    • Linguistics Club
    • Literary Society
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    • Professional Writing & Rhetoric Organization
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    • The Phoenix Literary Magazine
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