Longlisted for the PEN Hemingway Award One of The Millions and BuzzFeed's Most Anticipated
Books A spectacularly inventive debut novel that reinvents the tall tale for our times-Cuyahoga
defies all modest description...[it] is ten feet tall if it's an inch and it's a ramshackle
joy from start to finish (Brian Phillips author of Impossible Owls).Big Son is a spirit of the
times-the times being 1837. Behind his broad shoulders shiny hair and church-organ laugh Big
Son practically made Ohio City all by himself. The feats of this proto-superhero have earned
him wonder and whiskey toasts but very little in the way of fortune. And without money Big
cannot become an honest husband to his beloved Cloe (who may or may not want to be his wife
honestly).In pursuit of a steady wage our hero hits the (dirt) streets of Ohio City and
Cleveland the twin towns racing to become the first great metropolis of the West. Their
rivalry reaches a boil over the building of a bridge across the Cuyahoga River-and Big stumbles
right into the kettle. The resulting misadventures involve elderly terrorists infrastructure
collapse steamboat races wild pigs and multiple ruined weddings.Narrating this deliriously
fun (Brian Phillips) tale is Medium Son-known as Meed-apprentice coffin maker almanac author
orphan and the younger brother of Big. Meed finds himself swept up in the action and he is
forced to choose between brotherly love and his own ambitions. His uncanny voice-plain but
profound colloquial but surprisingly poetic-elevates a slapstick frontier tale into a
screwball origin myth for the Rust Belt.In Cuyahoga tragedy and farce jumble together in a
riotously original voice. Evoking the Greek classics and the Bible alongside nods to Looney
Tunes Charles Portis and Flannery O'Connor Pete Beatty has written a rollicking revisionist
(mid)Western with universal themes of family and fate-an old weird America that feels brand
new.
