Emily Ate the Wind tells the story of the drinkers, gamblers, lifelong friends, and frustrated lovers whose lives revolve around The Bar. Told in a series of vignettes, love letters, question and answer formats, newspaper clippings, short stories, and prose poems, the familiar dramas of these characters’ lives unfold with deft, poetic strokes. From sweeping lyricism to gritty realist scenes, Peter Conners follows these characters from childhood to adulthood, from marriage to war, through loyalty and the shock of betrayal.

"Sparks of brilliant images light up the compressed worlds Peter Conners creates with words. Music is made with whispers and curses, belches and laughter, pronouncements and asides and sly retorts. Startling lists transform into unsettling truths. The performances in Emily Ate the Wind are dazzling." -Joanna Scott

"Like the grotesques of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Conners’ characters slice through these pages with their gaping moral, spiritual and emotional blindspots, and their big hopes and hopelessness. Loosely woven together (and including lovely anomalies, such as the tales from an earlier era written by the author’s father and the fabulous interview with a sunburn victim), these stories slip between the heartrending and the visionary, lashing to a wounding close." -Eleni Sikelianos

"Peter Conners’ novella Emily Ate the Wind extends the experiments of such well-known, locally focused writers as Sherwood Anderson and Thorton Wilder. In both Winesburg, Ohio and Our Town, these writers chose to focus on a small town and its people. Their lives come to represent in a loose allegorical fashion the human experience. Conners extends these experiments by adding wild stylistic shifts and various framing devices that present a multi-voiced and multi-layered approach to his ‘local,’ known only as ‘The Bar’ somewhere in upstate New York."