Overview

With humor and grace, Ryle depicts a quirky cast of characters and their post-pandemic hopes, fears, gripes, and longings in this engaging collection of linked stories. One foggy morning, an email appears in inboxes across the small town of Lanier, Indiana. ""Invitation to Participate: Sexual Practices in a Small Midwestern Town,"" the subject line reads. A link leads to an extensive survey. Street by street and resident by resident-from the basketball coach in retirement with a bad lung, to the bartender finding her way to writing, to the health department worker with a vendetta against the hot-dog vendor-the email opens up the secret (and not so secret) lives of one community, and reveals the surprising complexity of love, friendship, and belonging in our post-Covid times.

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9798998954702

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Reviews

Comparisons to Olive Kitteridge are inevitable, but the tone and expansiveness of this novel-in-stories hark back to Spoon River Anthology (if not Chaucer). Thoroughly refreshing: an astute portrait of contemporary small-town America that's genuinely fun to read. (Kirkus Reviews starred review) I've not been this undone and awed by a short story collection since The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw. Robyn Ryle proves that narrative fearlessness, ambition and radical play reach their highest resonance when foundationed on an ungodly talent and stunning skill. (Kiese Laymon, award-winning author of HEAVY: AN AMERICAN MEMOIR) Robyn Ryle knows her small town inside and out, celebrating the strange and mundane equally. SEX OF THE MIDWEST isn't about sex so much as love and loneliness, and, ultimately, belonging. (Stewart O'Nan, author of EMILY, ALONE) Set during post-Covid societal reentry, SEX OF THE MIDWEST is proof of the multitudes people contain: quirks, fetishes, gripes, and great depth. With humor and moments of grace, Robyn Ryle depicts young love, new old love, the passage of time, and our remarkable human ability to learn and change. (Daphne Kalotay, Grace Paley prize-winning author of THE ARCHIVISTS: STORIED)

Author Information

Robyn Ryle is a writer and a professor of sociology and gender studies at Hanover College in Hanover, Indiana. She received her PhD in sociology from Indiana University-Bloomington and is originally from northern Kentucky. She is the author of a young adult novel, FAIR GAME, about a girls' basketball team that challenges the boys to a high-stakes game, and of THROW LIKE A GIRL, CHEER LIKE A BOY: THE EVOLUTION OF GENDER, IDENTITY, AND RACE IN SPORTS about the history of sports from a sociological perspective. Find more at robynryle.com

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