I’m pleased to announce our biggest deal yet. After a round of auditions and some nail biting, today we closed the deal to produce The Heart of Things by John Hildebrand for Audible.com. The Heart of Things is a series of essays about his experiences traveling the Midwest, written with gentle humor reminiscent of EB White. The book is published by Wisconsin Historical Society Press.
John Hildebrand is a well-known author and former editor of Wisconsin Trails Magazine and a radio host on Wisconsin Public Radio. He has written for Harper’s, Audubon, Sports Illustrated, and has two previous nonfiction books to his credit. His book Mapping the Farm received high praise in The New Yorker, Publisher’s Weekly, and The New York Times. He has also been awarded a Bush Artist Fellowship, a Wisconsin Arts Board Fellowship, the BANTA Award from the Wisconsin Literary Association, and a Friends of American Writers Literary Award.
SoundFridge is honored to partner with Wisconsin Historical Society Press to bring this latest book to Audible.
FROM THE BOOK JACKET:
“I’ve never believed that living in one place means being one thing all the time, condemned like Minnie Pearl to wear the same hat for every performance. Life is more complicated than that.”
In this remarkable book of days, John Hildebrand charts the overlapping rings—home, town, countryside—of life in the Midwest. Like E. B. White, Hildebrand locates the humor and drama in ordinary life: church suppers, Friday night football, outdoor weddings, garden compost, family reunions, roadside memorials, camouflage clothing. In these wry, sharply observed essays, the Midwest isn’t The Land Time Forgot but a more complicated (and vastly more interesting) place where the good life awaits once we figure exactly out what it means. From his home range in northwestern Wisconsin, Hildebrand attempts to do just that by boiling down a calendar year to its rich marrow of weather, animals, family, home—in other words, all the things that matter
