Anderson Ferrell's first novel, Where She Was (1985), received the National Endowment for the Arts Grant for Literature. His second, Home for the Day (1994), was selected as one of the year's best by New York magazine and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. His third novel, Have You Heard, was published in 2004.
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Home for the DayA Novel
…he didn’t do it the clean way. He stepped out onto his front stoop where I could see him, cocked his shotgun, the one his daddy had given him, and aimed at me. I am trying to think that the reason my daddy fired over my head instead of into it is that he loved me so much.
Home for the Day:A Novel- Print Books
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Home for the DayA Novel
“You smell like a girl,” Johnny said, smiling.
“I know,” I said, and I smiled, too. And when he saw that I didn’t care, he didn’t care either, and he would press closer to me. Sometimes his nose would be in my hair, and his breath would be like warm water all over my head, and that felt good, as if it was what ought to be even though I knew it was something that God saw wherever it happened, and remembered and sent to hell not everybody it happened to, but everybody who liked it.
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Home for the DayA Novel
It’s women’s work I do. On hot summer days when all the other boys are swimming or playing baseball or going howling-wild in the woods and fields which are running distance from anywhere in town, I slip away behind my grandmother’s washhouse and arrange funerals. I spend long hours making caskets out of cigar boxes—humming somber but hopeful hymns. Since the time I discovered I wasn’t a girl, but gave up anyway trying to join the race of boys, I have buried things. Dignified burials I give to frogs car-smashed in the street at night. Beetles, killed by DDT which is sprayed all over town by the county health department to keep down mosquitoes, rest in ground which only my imagination has hallowed.
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"Ferrell's melodious backtracking and sweet-tea atmospherics, along with his catty eye for small-town social distinctions and his keen ear for fence-line gossip, imbue Have You Heard with a juicy charm." —The New York Times Book Review
"Remarkable writing . . . Ferrell is gifted not only at drawing realistic and sympathetic characters but also at making the most outlandish events seem feasible." —Time Out New York [on Have You Heard]
"Strange and wonderful . . . A beautiful, bountiful and unusual book." —The Boston Globe [on Have You Heard]
Selected Works
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