bruce kellner

On a midwestern farm in the last century, a boy is forced to come of age in a colorful family of dysfunctional women, scarred by the unfulfilled dreams of his alcoholic mother, his strange spinster aunts, his malevolent nieces, and especially "the prettiest girls in Euphoria, Kansas," his five unforgettable sisters.

The hapless lives of frigid Emily, beautiful Louella, the competitive but dim twins Verda and Opal, and baleful Alice (also the lives of the losers they marry or don't) range from hilarious to heartbreaking. Inevitably, these women - equally appealing and appalling - dominate their much younger "Brother," an identity he can only escape by fleeing from them.

In The Prettiest Girls in Euphoria, Kansas, literary biographer Bruce Kellner probes the fragmented nature of memory in a narrative that does not tell time by clocks or remember it by calendars.

By turns whimsical, bawdy, poignant, and heartfelt, The Prettiest Girls in Euphoria, Kansas examines not only the empowering sense of the past on the present but the indestructible threads that bind families together.