Mad Prairie

Mad Prairie is a short story collection by Kate McIntyre, published in 2021 by the University of Georgia Press.^[1] It contains seven short stories and a novella, focused on McIntyre's home state of Kansas.^[1] The stories are linked by their shared setting and by relationships between the characters, which are sometimes explained belatedly as a surprise reveal.^[1]

Mad Prairie

Author	Kate McIntyre
Publisher	University of Georgia Press
Publication date	2021
Pages	176
ISBN	9780820360744

Kansas is portrayed as a repressive place to live.^[1][2] Anuradha Prasad describes McIntyre's Kansas as "a dead end to dreams—stunted and stifling, its landscape uninspiring."^[2] According to Patrick Carey writing for the Colorado Review, "ultra-traditional gender and sex relations" are "fundamental" to the collection's depiction of Kansas as "a black hole that binds together people" who know they should actually leave their current situation.^[1] In an interview, McIntyre stated that she did not want the novel to be read as solely a criticism of Kansas, expressing affection for Kansans and for the Kansas landscape.^[3]

Many of the stories focus on violence, especially in the novella.^[1] McIntyre described "the unpredictability of male anger" as a core theme, and said she wanted to show how it can be mingled with love and humour.^[3] The violence of the stories exists in parallel with mundane events that Carey describes as "the endless dopiness of people going through everyday life".^[1] Prasad describes the characters as "a parade of passive, hapless, and sinister characters" who "tread wildly absurd and terrifying paths".^[2] Carey compares McIntyre to both Shirley Jackson (for the Gothic horror of the violent events) and to George Saunders (for the humorous "dopey couples").^[1]

The collection won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction in 2020, which led to its publication by the University of Georgia Press the following year.^[4] It was also selected as a 2022 Kansas Notable Book, chosen by the Kansas Center for the Book at the State Library of Kansas,^[5] and longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for a debut short-story collection.^[6]

Author

Kate McIntyre was raised in Salina, Kansas.^[3] Her mother was the director of the Salina Education Foundation.^[4] McIntyre began writing in elementary school.^[3] She graduated from Salina Central High School in 2000,^[4] and later attended Harvard University.^[3] As of 2025, she is an associate professor of creative writing at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute.^[7] There, she edits the literary journal The Worcester Review.^[4]