About Coop
Last seen sleeping off his wedding night in the back of a 1951 International Harvester pickup, Michael Perry is now living in a rickety Wisconsin farmhouse. Faced with thirty-seven acres of fallen fences and overgrown fields, and informed by his pregnant wife that she intends to deliver their baby at home, Perry plumbs his unorthodox childhood—his city-bred parents took in more than a hundred foster children while running a ramshackle dairy farm—for clues to how to proceed as a farmer, a husband, and a father.
And when his daughter Amy starts asking about God, Perry is called upon to answer questions for which he’s not quite prepared. He muses on his upbringing in an obscure fundamentalist Christian sect and weighs the long-lost faith of his childhood against the skeptical alternative (“You cannot toss your seven-year-old a copy of Being and Nothingness“).
Whether Perry is recalling his childhood (“I first perceived my father as a farmer the night he drove home with a giant lactating Holstein tethered to the bumper of his Ford Falcon”) or what it’s like to be bitten in the butt while wrestling a pig (“two firsts in one day”), Coop is filled with the humor his readers have come to expect. But Perry also writes from the quieter corners of his heart, chronicling experiences as joyful as the birth of his child and as devastating as the death of a dear friend.
Alternately hilarious, tender, and as real as pigs in mud, Coop is suffused with a contemporary desire to reconnect with the earth, with neighbors, with meaning . . . and with chickens.
About Michael
Michael Perry is a humorist and author of the bestselling memoirs Population 485: Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time and Truck: A Love Story, the essay collection Off Main Street, and the upcoming memoir Coop: A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting. Perry has written for Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, Outside, Backpacker, Orion, and Salon.com, and is a contributing editor to Men’s Health. His essays have been heard on NPR’s All Things Considered, and he has performed and produced two live audience recordings (I Got It From the Cows and Never Stand Behind a Sneezing Cow). Perry lives in rural Wisconsin, where he remains active with the local volunteer rescue service.
Visit Michael at his website, www.sneezingcow.com.
Michael Perry’s TLC Book Tours TOUR STOPS:
Monday, May 17th: Tales of a Capricious Reader
Wednesday, May 19th: Book Nook Club
Thursday, May 20th: Raging Bibliomania
Wednesday, May 26th: Booksie’s Blog
Wednesday, May 26th: FIMBY
Thursday, May 27th: Chefdruk Musings
Tuesday, June 1st: Dreadlock Girl Reads
Wednesday, June 2nd: Book-a-rama
Thursday, June 3rd: Book Club Classics!
Monday, June 7th: Find Your Next Book Here
Tuesday, June 8th: Bloggin’ ‘Bout Books
Thursday, June 10th: It’s All About Books