We Make Mud: Stories

The brothers in Peter Markus’s We Make Mud can’t understand why cars drive through their dirty river town without stopping, why the people in those cars don’t stop and stay. After all, there is a muddy river there, and in and around that muddy river there are fish to be fished for—fish, and a father who walks on water, and a house with a back of the yard telephone pole covered with the chopped off heads of fish, not to mention a girl that the brothers make out of mud, not to mention the brothers themselves, the many different brothers these brothers have become. In these fifty-three mythically charged stories, Markus repeatedly riffs on and rearranges the elements of this dirty river town with this dirty river running through it, speaking its stories, its reinvented hauntings, with an entrancing cant, a new American language unlike that of any other writer, its vocabulary constrained but still big enough to make a world, to make any number of worlds revealing what lies hidden within the rituals of our own families, the landmarks of our homes.