Across the odd contours of the American landscape, people are searching for the things that aren't irretrievably lost, for the incandescent beneath the ordinary. An ex-Bible student with raucously asocial tendencies rescues the preserved body of an Indian chief from the frigid depths of Lake Superior in a caper that nets a wildly unexpected bounty. A band of sixties radicals, now approaching middle age, reunite to free an old comrade from a Mexican jail. A fifty-year-old suburban housewife flees quietly from her abusive businessman husband at a highway rest stop, climbs a fence, and explores the bittersweet pageant of the preceding years within the sanctuary of an Iowa cornfield.

The Woman Lit by Fireflies is the work of a classic writer at the very top of his form--a hard-living, hard-writing hero of American letters whose novellas comprise a sweeping tribute to the nation's heartland and the colorful, courageous characters who inhabit it.