"In A Gravestone Made of Wheat, Weaver returns again to the land he knows best in a finely crafted collection of stories about small towns, farm life, sweet love, harsh times, and religious revivalism. Pervading every story are Weaver's primary concerns of family--those that endure against all odds and those that do not--and nature, which can be bountiful and whimsical and cruel in equal measure"--Book jacket.

The feature film Sweet Land was based on this short story about a Norwegian American farmer and his German immigrant common-law bride. Excerpted from Sweet Land: New and Selected Stories.

Includes "A Gravestone Made of Wheat", the basis of the independent film Sweet Land.

Up until now, Billy Baggs's life has been loaded with nevers. Never been to a movie. Never played baseball with a real team. Never got over feeling guilty for the loss of his brother. But change is in the air. Billy discovers he has a natural talent for baseball, especially as a pitcher. Maybe, just maybe, there's more in store for him than life on the farm. But can Billy convince his father of that? Or is he destined to spend the rest of his life pitching nothing but hay?Teenager Billy Baggs is desperately needed on his family's struggling dairy farm, but he's also an extraordinarily gifted natural baseball player. How he struggles to reconcile his father's desire to keep him on the farm with his coach's interest in getting him on the field is at the heart of this ‘meaty story.… The complex characters grow and change in profoundly real ways.''K. ‘[With] flashes of humor, a wealth of lovingly recounted details evokes the difficult daily life on a small dairy farm.''Publishers Weekly. 1994 Best Books for Young Adults (ALA) 1994 Books for the Teen Age (NY Public Library) 1993 "Pick of the Lists" (ABA)

In a small town in northern Minnesota, the much-anticipated Saturday night dirt-track race at the old-fashioned, barely viable Headwaters Speedway becomes, in many ways, an important life-changing event for all the participants on and off the track.

Minnesota's Will Weaver has been a hunter since he was a young boy, following in the footsteps of his father, a dedicated and seasoned outdoorsman. As he writes, "in the fall, when Canada geese came through and when partridge season opened, [we] heard the far-off thudding report of shotguns--and in November the heavier poom-poom! of deer rifles." Hunting frames Weaver's childhood memories, his relationship with his father, and his own definition of self. And although one side of his family lineage includes men who would not hunt, or go to war, or carry a rifle, Weaver is caught off guard when his son and daughter show no interest in upholding the tradition of the hunt. The Last Hunter is a twenty-first-century collection of deeply personal tales--a truly American story. Weaver's heartfelt rendering sweeps us along on a family journey from an isolated North Dakota farm "built around a fork and shovel" to postmodern America. Grounded in telling and luminous detail, The Last Hunter is an examination of family, life on the land, and those things we hold dear enough to want to carry along, one generation to another. Praise for Will Weaver: ". . . his stories view America's heartland with a candid but charitable eye." --New York Times on A Gravestone Made of Wheat ". . . pitch perfect. Superb." --Kirkus Reviews on Full Service " Weaver . . . is a writer of uncommon natural talent. He's that rare Real Thing, a writer writing eloquently, often between the lines but always with an undertow of passion about what he knows, where he lives, what he's been through." --Los Angeles Times Will Weaver is a writer of many books, including Red Earth, White Earth; Sweet Land: New & Selected Stories; and Full Service, one of several of his award-winning young adult novels. An avid outdoorsman, Weaver lives with his wife in Bemidji.

Life is hard on a dairy farm in the heartland of Minnesota. Milking, haying, planting and harvesting leave little time for the thing Billy Baggs loves most--baseball. When Billy's father is sent to jail, the burden of providing for the family falls to Billy, and the long-awaited season of summer baseball becomes an impossibility. The sequel to the ALA Best Book Striking Out.

Weaver can write with both lyrical excitement and gritty power.-San Francisco Chronicle

Minnesota's barns are remarkable testaments to a midwestern way of life, one centered on the land, work, family, ingenuity, and perseverance. Many think of barns as breathtaking landmarks along the byways. Others have their favorite barns--the well-kept, red dairy barn near St. Cloud, the faded horse barn on the way to Faribault. Still others know these structures more intimately: barns are as integral to their lives as family and home. In Barns of Minnesota, photographer Doug Ohman showcases the vast array of these exceptional landmarks, built by hand in wood, stone, brick, or metal and dating back as far as 1880. Where Ohman's photographs capture the beauty of the barn from the outside in, Will Weaver's evocative story illuminates the life of the barn from the inside out. Readers witness the making and breaking of one barn as it plays into the life and sustenance of several generations of one family who settled the land in 1922 and who farmed into the age of agribusiness. Seventy-five stunning color photographs accompanied by Weaver's moving story uplift these beautiful buildings and a way of life on the land that is as strong and proud, as fragile and humble, as the barns among us.