Cuyahoga

Winter.
In the stories you are used to, a stranger arrives at the castle, or the king is gnawed by crisis. Swords bang together. Ghosts trouble a pale hero. Lovers' hearts boiling. We drink down such wild stories to drown our worries. They are whiskey to wash out our brains.

My brother's stories are more apple cider. They are good to drink but you will not forget yourself entirely. Wholesome tales, without too many fricasseed widows. True mostly - I will not lie any more than is wanted for decency. Simple and moral, easy to grab, the better to encourage someone over the head with. Not too quiet - you must not fall asleep. Let us have commerce and racing horses. Progress and the mastery of nature. Swap swords for axes and plows. Let us have tenderness but also a dash of cussedness and tragedy. All in the manner native to Ohio.

In this story lovers' hearts do not boil but go slowly like stew. The crisis has got square cow's teeth instead of fangs. There is not a king to be seen. Only my brother as hero.

And we will have a stranger at the castle.

I will take that good part.

My name is Medium Son.

We are no longer strangers any - folks call me Meed.

Pete Beatty is a Cleveland-area native. He has taught writing at Kent State University and the University of Alabama. He currently works at the University of Alabama Press. He lives with his wife in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Cuyahoga is his first novel.

"Beatty evokes the familiarities of genre, history and place while drafting them for a wild new context. In this regard, Cuyahoga is a breezy fable of empire, class, conquest and ecocide... Beatty revels in fabulizing a region he clearly knows and loves."
-New York Times Book Review

"Pete Beatty's very funny, rambunctious debut novel, Cuyahoga...could be read with pleasure in 2002, or 1950. Or 1837, when most of it is set. It's a satire of tall tales, but not a distant, too-cool treatment. Beatty, a Cleveland-area native, deeply inhabits the tone and style of the form, paying sidelong homage to an essential American genre... A healthy society might stand to be more skeptical of the myth-making that creates such figures. But in the society we have, they endure, and Beatty wrings absurd and serious pleasure from them."
-Los Angeles Times

"Entertaining, rambunctious, and touching... [Big Son is] the most extraordinary hero in Ohio's history, a hero hitherto unknown and unsung (and, admittedly, fictional)... Cuyahoga is filled with memorable characters...Rough-hewn and ribald, uproarious and affecting, Beatty's novel is a singular piece of work. Big Son is a frontier demigod in the mold of Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill, and Davy Crockett, but far more poignantly drawn than any of them...The book's dialogue is wonderfully idiosyncratic, its asides surprisingly insightful...A great read set in a great city, Cuyahoga is tragic and comic, hilarious and inventive - a 19th-century legend for 21st-century America."
-Boston Globe

"A light-hearted parody of America's founding mythologies,"
-The Wall Street Journal

"A hilarious and moving exploration of family, home, and fate ... you won't read anything else like it this year."
-Buzzfeed, most anticipated

"It's worth mentioning how much fun there is to be had with Cuyahoga, a lot of which will provoke out-loud laughter. The robust yarn's patron