The Economist

After growing up enthralled by Laura Ingalls Wilder and her love of the pristine prairie around DeSmet, South Dakota, I found another form of austere prairie beauty in the retreat and despair of Christopher Grimes’s (fictional) Freyman, North Dakota. Following Public Works (2005) and The Pornographers (2012), Grimes’ The Economist continues probing the ways economies and public policies intersect with individual lives and personal conflicts. To bring pathos to an emerging “deplorable” takes this novel far beyond social commentary and well into art.
Cris Mazza, Author of It’s No Puzzle