Corn Sweat by Toby Babcock
In the Iowa countryside, the corn keeps growing. People keep working. And some things are easier left unsaid.
Corn Sweat is a collection of twelve short stories and ten interwoven vignettes exploring contemporary rural life across the fields, gravel roads, river bottoms, small towns, bars, farms, and forgotten corners of Iowa and the Great Plains.
Corn Sweat is regional realism without nostalgia. It looks beyond the postcard image of the American heartland to the complicated people who live there, the exhausted, the lonely, the stubborn, the wounded, the funny, the reckless, and the resilient.
Raw, intimate, darkly humorous, and at times haunting, Corn Sweat is a portrait of working-class survival and psychological isolation in a place where beauty and brutality can occupy the same stretch of road.
For readers drawn to literary short fiction, regional American writing, rural realism, working-class stories, and fiction that explores the hidden lives beneath seemingly ordinary people, Corn Sweat offers a stark journey into the contemporary Midwest.
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Author Bio:
Toby Babcock is a writer from the rural Midwest with a background in local agricultural management, co-ops, and field scouting across Iowa and Nebraska. Drawing heavily on the stark landscapes of the Great Plains, Babcock’s fiction explores masculine isolation, economic vulnerability, and the unresolved mysteries of rural flight. Corn Sweat is a debut short story anthology.