Description
On NPR’s list of best books of 2025
One foggy morning, an email appears in inboxes across the small midwestern town of Lanier, Indiana, population 12,234. “Invitation to Participate: Sexual Practices in a Small Midwestern Town,” the subject line reads. A link leads to an extensive survey, but the people of Lanier want to know: why have they been chosen. And by whom? In these linked short stories, the characters of SEX OF THE MIDWEST look for connection and identity as they build and rebuild community after the isolation of the pandemic.
Don Blankman, who has an oxygen tank and a bum lung from his encounter with Covid, believes the email and the epidemic of STDs at the junior high are both part of the moral decline of the town. Health inspector Loretta, slowly freed from her grief over her mother’s death, engages in a vendetta against the hot dog man that slides into a hopeful and strange relationship even the survey might not have a spot for. And for Rachel, the bartender at the Main Street Saloon, the email stokes the flames of the mid-life crisis she’s been creeping up, as well as her worries about her gay daughter’s place in the town. Street by street and house by house, the email opens up the secret (and not-so-secret) lives of one small town and reveals the surprising complexity of life (and sex) in the Midwest.
More from Robyn Ryle
REVIEWS
“… the author’s trenchant insights and affection for the characters, especially Lanier itself, abound. 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 starred review
“Ah, the Midwest, home of flatness and reticence. Like the people of Winesburg, Ohio, the residents of Lanier, Indiana, harbor their hopes and fears privately, afraid no one else will understand. 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
“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. It’s impossible to say what’s more soul-snatching here: the premises or the writing. It’s hard to deliver on what feels like an impossible book to imagine. It’s harder to make the writing of that impossible book seem easy, or even inevitable. Robyn Ryle does both. The short story and literary sex are somewhere sweating and smiling, so thankful that they are alive, and in union, again.”
— Kiese Laymon, author of LONG DIVISION and HEAVY: AN AMERICAN MEMOIR
