Bohemian Girl

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Young Harriet’s father sells her as a slave to settle his gambling debt with an eccentric Indian—and her story is just beginning. Part Huck Finn, part True Grit, Harriet’s story of her encounter with the dark and brutal history of the American West is a true original. When she escapes the strange mound-building obsession of her Pawnee captor, Harriet sets off on a trek to find her father, only to meet with ever-stranger characters and situations along the way. She befriends a Jewish prairie peddler, escapes with a chanteuse, is imprisoned in a stockade and rescued by a Civil War balloonist, and becomes an accidental shopkeeper and the surrogate mother to an abandoned child, while abetting the escape of runaway slaves.

A picaresque in the American vein, Terese Svoboda’s new novel is the Bohemian answer to Willa Cather’s iconic My Ántonia. Lifting the shadows off an entire era of American history in one brave girl’s quest to discover who she is, Bohemian Girl gives full play to Svoboda’s prodigious talents for finding the dark and the strange in the sunny American story—and the beauty and the hope in its darkest moments.

Bison Books (Flyover Series): September 2011 | Paperback: 193 pages

Terese Svoboda

New York/Victoria writer Terese Svoboda has a body of work that includes poetry, novels, memoirs, translation, biography, and over two hundred published short stories. Black Glasses Like Clark Kent is a memoir of her uncle's chilling experience as a military policeman in occupied Japan, and Weapons Grade uses poetry to interrogate the power of occupation —both political and personal. "No one who cares about American culture will want to miss this book,” writes Cary Nelson, editor of Anthology of Modern American Poetry about her biography Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet. Theatrix: Poetry Plays was published in 2021 and her eighth novel, Dog on Fire, was published in 2023. Roxy and Coco, a speculative novel about harpies, and The Long Swim, her third collection, will be published in 2024.

Reviews

'There are writers you would be tempted to read regardless of the setting or the period or the plot or even the genre...Terese Svoboda is one of those writers.' —Bloomsbury Review

"Svoboda juggles comedy, mystery, tragedy, horror—and masters them all in Dog on Fire." —Superstition Review

“There are many mythic reimaginings out there, but I can guarantee you that Roxy and Coco is unlike anything you've read—Terese Svoboda's harpies are winged avengers, a celestial task force who save kids who have been abused by their terrestrial protectors." —Karen Russell

"Terese Svoboda is a master of the dire and the blackly comic and a virtuoso of economy and voice." —Jim Shepard.

"Creating a western world as raucous and unpredictable as any imagined by Larry McMurtry, Bohemian Girl teems with characters as tragically heroic as those created by Willa Cather" —Starred Booklist.

"Discovering Lola Ridge’s work and life will be a delight for readers of women authors, feminism, and poetry, especially those interested in activist writers." Library Journal.

“Svoboda’s poems are as haunting as they are funny, as pleasurable as they are powerful.”--Publisher’s Weekly.

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