And come to think of it, thanks to Miss Grant. She taught me how to type.
About the Author
MICHAEL PERRY was raised on a small farm in northwestern Wisconsin, where he remains a resident today. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, Salon.com, Utne Reader, and Cowboy Magazine. A registered nurse by training, Perry has been an active emergency medical technician since 1988 and a volunteer firefighter since 1995. He serves on a volunteer basis with two rural rescue services and one fire department. He is the author of the critically acclaimed and bestselling memoir Population: 485: Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time. While his writing reflects a wide range of experience, he is proud to say that he can still run a pitchfork and milk a cow in the dark.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
Also by Michael Perry
Big Rigs, Elvis & the Grand Dragon Wayne
Why They Killed Big Boy…and
Other Stories
Never Stand Behind a Sneezing Cow
(audio cassette/CD)
I Got It from the Cows (CD)
Population: 485: Meeting Your
Neighbors One Siren at a Time
Praise for Michael Perry
and Population: 485
“Swells with unadorned heroism. He’s the real thing.”
—USA Today
“In the best tradition of books that pay quiet homage to community service, place, and the men and women who live there. A perfectly pitched celebration of small-town life.”—
—Kirkus Reviews
“This is a quietly devastating book—intimate and disarming and lovely.”
—Adrienne Miller, Esquire
“I have been waiting for thirty years for a fresh and talented voice to rise out of the volunteer fire service in America, and finally it has arrived in Michael Perry’s Population 485. Perry is a firefighter/EMT and he makes you feel you are responding right along with him…his hard work is told with the thoughtfulness and gracefulness of a first responder who cares about people, his town, our country, and the world we live in. Firefighters and EMTs will be talking about this book for a long time to come. And, so will all readers who have a love for American literature. This is a small-town story in the big tradition of Sherwood Anderson and James Agee.”
—Dennis Smith, author of Report from Ground Zero
“My heart goes out to anybody who knows—and writes as well as Michael Perry does—about rural small-town life. His book is often funny, sometimes heartbreaking, but always full of life, characters, and the tangled web of small-town history, daily drama, and strain of occasional weirdness that makes country living such a challenge and an adventure. If there’s one thing I admire more than a man who can go home again, and does, and happily, it’s a volunteer firefighter. He has written a joy of a book, as gnarly, stubborn, courageous, and full of eccentricity in all its forms as country life itself.”
—Michael Korda, author of Country Matters
“Minnesota has Garrison Keillor…. Neighboring Wisconsin has Michael Perry. If you read one nonfiction title this autumn, make it this one. It’s that good.”
—The Sunday Oklahoman
“Part portrait of a place, part rescue manual, part rumination of life and death, Population: 485 is a beautiful meditation on the things that matter.”
—Seattle Times
“Population: 485 is bound to be one of the best nonfiction books of the year…. Filled with moments of tenderness, humor, and just plain goofiness as it takes us into the lives and homes of the inhabitants of one small town…. Makes for riveting reading.”
—Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel
“Finely crafted, hard-to-come-by honesty.”
—Hope magazine
“With self-effacing humor, stellar wit, and phenomenal writing, Perry gives an intelligent, articulate voice to smalltowners…. Powerful, engaging, and often hilarious.”
—The Phantom Tollbooth
“Somewhere between Garrison Keillor’s idyllic-sweet Lake Wobegon and the narrow-mindedness of Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street lies the reality of small-town life. This is where Michael Perry lives.”
—St. Paul Pioneer Press
“May simply be the best book about small-town life ever written.”
—Wisconsin State Journal
“Humorous, poignant.”
—Chicago Tribune
“A remarkable new book, sometimes comic—sometimes sad.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Michael Perry is like a sensitive, new-age Hemingway.”
—Salon.com
“Mike Perry’s writing is fresh, witty, and rich in quirky detail. He creates characters worth remembering, takes you on journeys you’ll not easily forget.”
—Jeanne Marie Laskas, author of The Balloon Lady and Other People I Know
“When Robert Frost wrote of the need to be ‘versed in country things,’ he probably wasn’t thinking of traveling butchers or truck-driving singers or giant plastic Big Boys or epidemics of obesity or the big, ugly house on a hill. Then again, he never met Mike Perry. Rural America is changing fast, and Perry is one of the funniest, most astute chroniclers of those changes.”
—John Hildebrand, author of Mapping the Farm
“This is writing which frequently evokes small-town life, and yet mercifully avoids sentimentality or treacle.”
—Gayle Pemberton, author of The Hottest Water in Chicago: On Family, Race, Time, and American Culture
“Michael Perry’s essays and humor never fail to generate listener comments. I always look forward to recording his material for broadcast, and am pleased and proud to offer his work to my audience.”
—Eric Wheeler, Producer/Host, Spectrum West (Wisconsin Public Radio)
“Hop up on the old truck seat next to Mike Perry as he racks up the miles…. His perceptive, witty, unpretentious writing shows a respect for his fellow travelers, whether he’s riding with kids to a Christmas event or bouncing down the road toward home.”
—Marcy Tveidt, Minnesota Public Radio
“Michael Perry exults in the power and elasticity of language. But not just of language, of the human spirit as well…. Perry’s un-erring, if bemused, eye paints all people as if their lives were epiphanies, which of course they are.”
—Bill Friskics-Warren, The Nashville Scene
“Michael Perry’s commentaries…are fun, smart, clear, and filled with good sense. Writing like this is hard to do. Perry makes it look easy.”
—Dinty W. Moore, author of The Accidental Buddhist
“The best writers take us in tow to experience fully what their subjects experience and then ask, What do we make of this? Michael Perry is such a writer…he guides us to confront meaning in seemingly mundane things. And, often, just to laugh, clap our hands and surrender to mystery altogether.”
—Bill Hudgins, Road King magazine
“Language dances across Perry’s pages, the clarity of poetry swinging one last time with the tough love practiced by those devoted to a dying art.”
—Grant Alden, author of No Depression
Copyright
This is a work of nonfiction. In some instances, names, locations, and other identifying details have been changed to protect individual privacy.
OFF MAIN STREET. Copyright © 2007 by Michael Perry. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © MAY 2007 ISBN: 978006185
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