Nice Things Said About Pig Boy

"Set on a small hog farm in Indiana, this moving chronicle follows one year (1976) in the life of an impressionable seven-year-old and his hard-luck family. Young Crandell was a very plump child. According to family lore, he consistently gained weight even though no one ever saw him eating dinner. When somebody spied him suckling a pig sow with the other piglets at the trough, he earned his moniker: Pig Boy. Crandell, whose work has appeared in the Nebraska Review and elsewhere, relates the story of his nickname, as well as the trials of his childhood: his family were bankrupt sharecroppers; they struggled with expensive medical bills from Crandell's mother's hysterectomy; Crandell had to have several fingers re-attached after a farm accident. He captures the emotional adhesive of family bonds when he portrays how they came together to love and support each other in crisis, committed to one another and their home. Richly anecdotal, the work leaves no detail unexamined, whether physical or ethereal. Crandell addresses everything—the loss of property and pride, the presidential candidacy of Jimmy Carter, childhood fears, the effects of the TV series Roots on a poor white family, the far-reaching effects of his mother's depression—with poetry and imagination. This version of growing up in America delivers several compelling, stellar moments."

- Publisher's Weekly

"When a very young and frustrated Doug Crandell considers riding a wild boar from his small farm town to the bright lights of Wabash, Indiana, you realize you’re in the hands of a visionary. Crandell is a genuine talent, and Pig Boy’s Wicked Bird is a magical book. Don’t miss this one."

- John McNally, author of THE BOOK OF RALPH

"Pig Boy's Wicked Bird is a delight--funny and heartfelt and deftly turned out. A big tip of the hat to Doug Crandell."

-Martin Clark, author of THE MANY ASPECTS OF MOBILE HOME LIVING and PLAIN HEATHEN MISCHIEF

"Pig Boy’s Wicked Bird is a moving memoir of an engaging family, written by Doug Crandell with simplicity, clarity, sensitivity and warmth."

- Lee Gutkind, editor of Creative Nonfiction
and author of many books included, most recently, FOREVER FAT: ESSAYS BY THE GODFATHER.

"Doug Crandell writes of a life too rarely seen in literature these days. Just as the hardscrabble work of surviving on a small farm has vanished from the culture at large, it is a distant memory for most American writers. But Doug Crandell preserves in prose a world that, if it were lost forever, would diminish us by its absence. And what he has held on to in this astute, darkly humorous memoir gives us reason to celebrate."

- Tom Grimes, Author of WILL@epicqwest.com: A Medicated Memoir

Advance Praise for Doug's Other Book

"In lyrical, sophisticated prose, Crandell tells a preposterous tale of Midwestern farm life. His comic vision is reminiscent of Carolyn Chute’s – Erskine Caldwell solarized – where ugliness, ignorance and poverty are commonplace, but where life itself is celebrated. Crandell deftly interweaves the coming of age of a dirt farm boy with a lunatic father, who raises pigs, with a sub plot about the invasion of TV news and the media’s distortions of nature, value and truth. Nature prevails, as do family and this pastoral world, while the media mentality and the greed for fame and attention are exposed as the real ugliness."

– DeWitt Henry, author of THE MARRIAGE OF ANNA MAYE POTTS

"Man Vs. Nature is a most impressive debut."

– Greg Johnson, author of PAGAN BABIES and STICKY KISSES

"We are an urban race, or at least suburban, now, so a novel like Doug Candell’s Gorgeous MAN VS. NATURE, a wooly yarn spun on the blasted plains of rural Indiana, strikes us as a kind of science fiction – the Midwest as kin to Mars. That’s the great joy of this book, that such a "ordinary" landscape attains an extraordinary mythic aspect while it retains its poignant realer than real human scale. This is Postmodern Regionalism’s masterpiece – raucously symphonic and minutely tuned, a revelation and validation of this hidden place lost in our plainest sight."

- Michael Martone, author of THE BLUE GUIDE TO INDIANA

"I liked Man vs. Nature quite a lot: terrific writing -- smart, energetic, full of verve. quirky, witty, funny, jazzily syncopated, idiosyncratic of dialogue"

- Mikhail Iossel, author of EVERY HUNTER WANTS TO KNOW

"Mr. Doug Crandell's farmlife resembles a kind of wild and dangerous circus: all those animals and their excited witnesses. One of the characters here is intent on finding out what happened so he can exaggerate it down at the feed store. Well, welcome to the feed store. There's some sparkling, high-wire writing in this antic tale. Man vs. Nature is a lot of fun."

- Ron Carlson, author of THE SPEED OF LIGHT AND HOTEL EDEN