Hunter's Moon by Philip Caputo - August 2019

My latest book, a collection of short stories titled Hunter’s Moon, will be released in two weeks (August 6 is the publication date) by Henry Holt & Co. It was inspired by two much older works of short fiction, one by a Russian writer, Ivan Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches, and the other by an American, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio.

In the former, Turgenev, an avid outdoorsman, used hunting excursions to provide background for portraits of rural Russia and its people in the mid-19th-century. Anderson’s book, published in 1919 and still in print, is a series of loosely-connected tales that depicts life in a small midwestern town early in the 20th century. Winesburg, Ohio is considered a seminal work of modernist fiction, and it deeply influenced Ernest Hemingway’s 1925 story collection In Our Time, sometimes referred to as “the Nick Adams stories” for its recurrent character, Nick Adams, Hemingway’s alter-ego.

Hunter’s Moon mostly takes place in a fictional American town, Vieux Desert, on Michigan’s wild and remote Upper Peninsula. It features recurrent characters at different points in their lives over the course of several years, roughly from 2004 to 2018. One of them, Will Treadwell, who owns a microbrewery and pub in town, figures in five of the seven stories, sometimes in a minor role, sometimes as the protagonist. People who’ve read my 1987 novel, Indian Country, will recognize Treadwell and Vieux Desert. For years, I’ve wanted to return to it and to him, and Hunter’s Moon bought my ticket. 

In a sense, Hunter’s Moon can be considered a novel in stories, much like Winesburg, Ohio. Like Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches (one of my favorite books, by the way), it is not about hunting per se; it employs hunting trips as a context to illuminate masculine relationships in today’s America: old high-school friends, war buddies, fathers and sons. One story, however, is told from a woman’s point of view, and presents a once-a-year, extra-marital affair as she experiences it.

Though I did not, at the outset, intend to write a book showing that white, heterosexual males — much maligned these days as racists, sexists, misogynists, etc. — are as complex, emotionally nuanced, and individualized as anyone else, but I realized that’s what I’d done when I finished it.

This book, my 17th and my 10th work of fiction, is my first venture into the short-story form. My only other try at shorter fiction was the 1998 collection of novellas, Exiles, which is, incidentally, a book I’m rather proud of. Writing it wasn’t easy, but I found that writing Hunter’s Moon was even harder. In short stories, there’s no room for side trips or leisurely longueurs.

I turned 78 this year, so I’m not sure how many more books are left in me, if any. But I hope those of you who read this will also read Hunter’s Moon — and feel that the trip was worth it.

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