Donna Baier Stein’s Scenes from the Heartland (Serving House Books) is a Finalist for the 2019 Big Other Book Award for Fiction!

Thanks to Elizabeth Cohen and American Book Review, Project Muse has published a review of Letting Rain Have Its Say.

“By imaginatively playing with a visual work of art, the writer can expand its meaning—not in terms of enlarging the original work, but in terms of offering more possibilities.” Donna Baier Stein explores the limits and liberties of perception in this essay on writing fiction from images.

On March 29, 1976, the New Yorker ran a now-iconic cover called “View of the World from 9th Avenue.” This illustration by Saul Steinberg showed the Midwest—that land of flat vowels, grain silos, and repression—as a condensed strip of Kansas Corn, Nebraska, Kansas City, and Chicago as its only landmarks.

Nine tales that bring to life the early 20th century as witnessed by one of America's most well-known painters.

For Scenes from the Heartland, Baier Stein selects nine of Benton’s lithographs and, starting with what the artist chose to depict, weaves an intricate tapestry of mothers, sons, fathers, and daughters, people struggling against any number of odds in the Midwest of the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s.

The Silver Baron’s Wife is a beautifully written, moving, and historically rich, fictionalized account inspired by the true story of the life of Elizabeth Doe Tabor (widely known as Baby Doe Tabor).

Donna’s 2018 Saturday Evening Post Fiction Contest finalist, “A Landing Called Compromise” is available online

This definitive collection of the best short stories from the sixth annual Great American Fiction Contest continues The Saturday Evening Post's mission to support the legacy of the storyteller.