Nona Caspers

A sheepish admission: I’m often a little surprised when I come across a great story or writer from Minnesota. This seems to be a relatively common manifestation of Midwestern insecurity; it’s hard-wired in many of us to think that the worthiest art can only be a product of someplace else. But Nona Caspers deftly turns this odd, slightly self-hating bias on its head. Now a creative writing professor in San Francisco, Caspers is originally from rural Minnesota. Read her collection of short stories, Heavier Than Air (winner of the 2005 Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction), and in the space of an afternoon it’s possible to get lost in lives that are atypical yet wholly believable. “Country Girls,” for instance, is about a cowbone-painting fourteen-year-old girl who harbors illicit desires on a farm north of Melrose, Minnnesota. In “The EE Cry,” a couple of fad-dieters binge on desserts at Cafe Latté in St. Paul (they met at a weight-loss clinic in Maplewood). And somehow this is all just as fascinating as if it were happening anywhere else. 3032 Hennepin Ave., Minneapolis; 612-822-4611; www.magersandquinn.com