2015: About the Book

Back to Shorewood Reads 2015

Shotgun Lovesongs book cover.

Shotgun Lovesongs is Wisconsin author Nickolas Butler's first novel. Visit Butler's website to learn more about him, and read a summary of Shotgun Lovesongs. 

Not sure if you'll like it? Watch & find out:

More on Shotgun Lovesongs:

  • The New York Times Sunday Book Review article (April 3, 2014): "Like all good ensembles, Butler’s cast brings together a dynamic array of characters, all of them moving in divergent directions — though yearning for roughly the same moral center — as they rewrite their adult narratives amid emotional, financial and historical turbulence."
  • The New York Times book review  (March 10, 2014): "The most lyrical parts of this big-hearted book are about how all the characters, including the star, are almost physically drawn to the town and one another."
  • Star Tribune review (March 8, 2014): "In the background — like the steady beat of a kick drum — the town of Little Wing and the farmland that surrounds it come to scintillating life. It’s a place that drove these people apart, and brought them back together."
  • Wisconsin Humanities Council interview with Butler as part of The Working Lives Project (January 2015): "I want to explore certain themes: kindness, friendship, love, nature, decency. I see future projects being rooted here, in Wisconsin, or certainly the Midwest."

Displays a quote of Shotgun Lovesongs by Nikolas Butler. "He wrote songs about our place on earth; the everywhere fields of corn, the third-growth forests, the humpbacked hills and grooved-out draws. The knife-sharp cold, the too-short days, the snow, the snow, the snow. His songs were our anthems - they were our bullhorns and microphones and jukebox poems. We adored him; our wives adored him. We knew all the words to the songs and sometimes we were in the songs."