Michael Perry

When Harley Jackson finds a calf in his barn bearing the image of Jesus Christ, he hopes to keep it to himself to avoid a scene, but word gets out anyway, and Harley has to decide how to deal with the media circus, and save his farm from developers.

In over his head with two pigs, a dozen chickens, and a baby due any minute, the acclaimed author of Population: 485 gives us a humorous, heartfelt memoir of a new life in the country. Living in a ramshackle Wisconsin farmhouse-faced with thirty-seven acres of fallen fences and overgrown fields, and informed by his pregnant wife that she intends to deliver their baby at home-Michael Perry plumbs his unorthodox childhood for clues to how to proceed...

Written in a spirit of exploration rather than declaration, Montaigne in Barn Boots is a down-to-earth (how do you pronounce that last name?) look into the ideas of a philosopher "ensconced in a castle tower overlooking his vineyard," channeled by a midwestern American writing "in a room above the garage overlooking a disused pig pen." Whether grabbing an electrified fence, fighting fires, failing to fix a truck, or feeding chickens, Perry draws on...

When farmer Harold wakes to find his wife dead beside him in bed and snow threatening to crush the last life from his dwindling farm, he takes drastic steps toward a fresh start. Set in a world of stark wintry beauty, Forty Acres Deep is the brief, unrelenting tale of one person's attempt to make sense of a world he no longer recognizes while pitilessly calling himself into account. Seamed with grim humor and earthy revelations, it is an unforgiving...

In the 1990s, when he was a magazine freelancer hustling books off a card table at craft fairs, the mall, and out of his car trunk, Michael Perry self-published two books: Why They Killed Big Boy and Other Stories and Big Rigs Elvis, & the Grand Dragon Wayne. In 2005, after the success of Perry's book Population 485, Harper Perennial published Off Main Street, a collection of Perry's essays, magazine articles, and short fiction. Big Boy's Big Rig:...

"I'm happy to go to the opera, but I should like to be allowed to wear steel-toed boots with my evening suit. I like to read Harper's with a chaser of Varmint Hunter Magazine. Maybe that's why I enjoy a good show under canvas. Here we sit, brain-deep in arts and culture, but we're also just people hanging out in a tent, some of us wearing logging boots, a few of us wearing Birkenstocks, but best of all we're breathing free fresh air filled with music." From...

In this fresh collection of "Roughneck Grace" columns, New York Times bestselling author and humorist Michael Perry reinforces, his reputation, as a writer navigating between the transcendent ("The conga line was no longer a line, but rather a fluid knot of nearly a thousand happy children winding in and around itself throughout the aisles of the auditorium while Cyril Paul and the Calypso Monarchs played from the stage."), the quotidian ("Outside...

"Plants are truly awe-inspiring. They can be vast, minute, smelly, or spectacularly ugly. Some plants live on their own, or by growing off others; some live by air and water; others are carnivorous, eating the creatures around them; some plants look remarkably like animals; while others have unusual symbolism; and some have special cultural significance. This book explores them all, bringing together the most peculiar and most fascinating plants on...

J. R. R. Tolkien fans who long for more of the joy they get from The Lord of the Rings will find it in the writings of William Morris. He created the literature that Tolkien brought to such perfection. As a young man writing his future wife, Tolkien mentioned the inspiration he was getting from Morris: "Amongst other work I am trying to turn one of the short stories [of the Finnish Kalevala] . . . into a short story somewhat on the lines of Morris'...