Florida

About the Book

A young outlaw just acquitted of murder returns to this small town not far from the Canadian border. It’s the early 1970s, and a music student doing her practice teaching in the town, full of new ideas of love and sexual freedom, tries to protect him from vengeance. This archaic town is a tinderbox for the kind of spark she brings. She makes a risky trip across the border to Montreal with him, which brings down vengeance on them both. Soon she is alone in the woods with him—his captive and the townspeople’s problem: What is he trying to prove? They have no choice but to rescue her, but how? He proves to be a shaman in the woods . . . . For all its shocking outcome, Mason Smith’s new novel is an exuberant, often hilarious celebration of the human voices of a distinct place, of all “rumor and jabber and gossip,” literature included, no matter how sad the tale.

Praise for Mason Smith's first novel
Everybody Knows and Nobody Cares

"Joy, unmitigated joy. [Smith's] prose has an apparent effortlessness and a poetic flex and lilt that make you sit up straight."
-L. Woiwode, N. Y. Times Book Review

"This lovely first novel . . . quiet, humorous, open-eyed, . . . belongs to us here and now in the seventies the way Kerouac and Kesey belonged to their time."
-Richard Locke, N.Y. Times

"In tone, texture and pace, Everybody Knows and Nobody Cares is that rarity, a book with no false moves."
-R. Z. Sheppard, Time

"This superbly written novel . . . a compelling and complex narrative."
-James D. Houston, San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle

Included in Editors' Choice and Summer Reading List,
New York Times Book Review

About the Author

Mason Smith is the author of two full-length stage plays about the St. Lawrence Seaway construction years, Forces and The ‘Lunge Campaign; the novel Everybody Knows and Nobody Cares, (Knopf, 1971); and numerous articles in Sports Illustrated, Gray’s Sporting Journal, Adirondack Life, WoodenBoat, and other magazines. He holds an MA in Creative Writing and a Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Stanford University and has taught at Clarkson, SUNY Potsdam, and the University of California at Santa Cruz. A boatbuilder by trade, he now lives in the Adirondacks, at Long Lake, with his wife Hallie and their two children.