Orville, Illinois, is bucolic, charming, and almost Norman Rockwellesque--if you're white. But like many midwestern cities in the 1960s, it is a "sundown" town--a place where Black Americans are prohibited from entering or remaining after dark. The town's most adventurous woman, Cassie Zeul, is an outcast because she has no husband and takes an occasional lover. Her son, Gus, guided by Sister Damien, aspires to be a priest, but he is increasingly overwhelmed by his infatuation with Pat Lemkey--who is herself drawn to Jenny Biel, considered by many to be the most beautiful girl in town. Gus's best friend, Fenza Ryzchik Jr., a somewhat notorious bully desperate for his father's attention, hates "colored people," doesn't think he knows any, and is certain he can convince Jenny to marry him one day--without realizing that her devout mother has been passing for white her entire life. Events come to a head when a visiting nun from the South brings an African American friend with her to Midnight Mass one Christmas Eve. The dreams and desires of these characters collide and intersect as they navigate life and coming of age in the rural Midwest. In Janko's masterful hands, the darkness--of prejudice, privilege, and power--that they don't even recognize threatens to overwhelm their lives and their plans for the future. This novel forces us, as well as its characters, to acknowledge the cost of hiding our true selves, and of judging others based on the color of their skin or the longing of their hearts.

What We Don't Talk About

Literature & Fiction

Janko, James

Literary

University of Wisconsin Press

Love and Catastrophe

Poetry

Four Windows Press

The unique vision in Janko's Buffalo Boy and Geronimo is the depiction of the Vietnam War as seen through the lens of a wounded but resilient nature as a Confucian society still rooted in the earth and the unbroken fabric of ancestors is pitted against a desensitized military high-tech culture. As critic Paul Pines noted, "The forces here that seek to conquer the landscape are those, which by implication, shatter the harmonious fabric of the natural world to create a pathology that is far deeper than the political stakes indicate-one that indeed may determine the future of the entire ecosphere."
The two heroes of the book, Nguyen Luu Mong, the Vietnamese buffalo boy, and Antonio Lucio, the US Chicano medic (Geronimo), both have a deep respect for the natural world, and it is through their eyes that we witness the devastation of the natural world of which they are a part.
Geronimo's unit is engaged in search and destroy missions (one of the villages destroyed is Mong's), and he becomes so appalled by the pain and death inflicted on animals and humans that at one point he abandons his unit and rushes ahead to drive the animals away from an impending firebombing. Eventually he deserts and finds his way back into the jungle.
The young adolescent Mong loses his beloved buffalo in an early firefight and eventually sees his entire village destroyed, the survivors relocating deeper into Viet Cong territory. His is also a love story, and his marriage to Thien at the end of the novel is symbolic of the need for life to continue despite the devastation.

Buffalo Boy and Geronimo

United States

Curbstone Books

“Part of me wanted to quit, let the Red Birds hammer us, and slink away to hibernate all winter. I had that old feeling of worthlessness running through me, and sadness, too. A coach, whatever his age, should be a reservoir of hope, but I, in my Cub heart, boarded a shipwreck, my own Titanic, and awaited the dark plunge into the familiarity of loss.” Billy Donachio, an aging coach for the Chicago Cubs, has never had a lucky day let alone a lucky year. Every team he has been part of and everything he has ever cared about has ended up in the dumps. When at last he’s able to be a part of a winner, a Chicago Cub team on the cusp of World Series victory, Billy struggles with neurosis. A thief, a kleptomaniac, he loots the lockers of his star players and comes away with notes, letters, a neighborhood newspaper, a photograph, a computer disc. By accident, Billy receives an education. Chicago Magazine "A shut-In's Guide to Winter" (January 2018 ed.) recommends The Clubhouse Thief to get you through winter!

The Clubhouse Thief (Awp Award for the Novel)

New Issues Poetry and Prose

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Books by Janko, James