The Flyover Fiction Series, published by the University of Nebraska Press, takes its name from the stereotypical view of the Midwest as an anonymous expanse between coasts. Two recently added fiction titles ably demonstrate the series' real purposeÑintroducing readers to the Midwest as literary landmark.

As narrators go, you can't get any more omniscient than the main character in Terese Svoboda's novel, Tin God: "Hi, this is God-G-O-D, God with all the big letters." Svoboda's deity is not the theological conundrum readers might expect: " [...] I'm out here in the middle of a field. Oh, yeah, I'm everywhere, duh." In the wrong hands, the colloquial divinity can seem like a cheap trick, an easy way to inform a narrative with what passes for profundity. Kevin Smith's Dogma, for instance, is a thought-provoking pastiche of Roman Catholic orthodoxy, but Smith's God-played by a tumbling, clownish Alanis Morissette-seems like a glib answer to the serious questions raised by Smith's satire. What saves Svoboda's novel from the same fate is the author's exceptional voice, which can be as matter-of-fact as neighborly gossip or as expansive as the headiest philosophical treatise. The narrator's first-person omniscience is central to the novel's structure, alternating between a field in contemporary Nebraska and the same field centuries before, inhabited by its indigenous population and interloping Spanish colonists. As contemporary characters worry about the fallout from a lost bag of drugs, a revisionist world history of human pride and ignorance unfolds. Svoboda is no slouch when it comes to satire; rather than Smith, her cinematic counterpart is Luis Bunuel, whose surreal play with social and religious taboos was always informed by a rigorous intelligence. Here is Svoboda, voicing God's musings on religious sacrifice:

I've always liked offerings of incense of any kind. Out of all the foolish sacrifices: sons, first grain, fermented fruit, thrown coins covering half a pool, honey rubbed on charcoal-I like smoke best. It gives Me cover, it lets Me sneak out and enjoy myself. That anyone should give up what is most precious in obeisance to Me remains a frequently held but laughable belief. Gifts to god! You may as well try to find one your mother likes. What can God need? God takes and slips away.

Svoboda's take on human nature and history is wise, ribald, and revelatory.

The territory of Kellie Wells' Skin, her first novel, is the town of What Cheer, Kansas. In structure, the novel resembles Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, with each chapter devoted to a different character's point of view. But where Anderson's perspective treated the inhabitants of Winesburg with an almost clinical distanceÑas specimens of small-town malaiseÑWells creates an intimacy with the multiple consciousnesses that make up her narrative. This intimacy gives some chapters a lighter touch than Anderson's. Observes Martin LeFavor, "My father's name was Art, which, if you'd known him, you would surely have agreed is ironic. Art did not imitate life-he throttled it before it had a chance to throttle him." But close doesn't always mean comfortable; while her technical approach may be different, her vision is often comparable to Anderson's, exposing the obsessions and traumas belied by the town's homespun name. At one point, Rachel Loomis, one of the novel's most memorable narrators, talks religion with her mother:

"What are my sins?" I asked.

She said, "Well, your tally as yet don't amount to much, but just being born, being human, makes you fallen, because of what some other folks did before you came. You know about how Eve sullied the garden for everyone else. That's why women have to bleed, why we have to die. That there's the wellspring of suffering. It's a fall into skin, into the flesh." I said, "Jesus had skin." I wasn't actually sure if this was true, but, as I couldn't see how it could be otherwise, I risked it. Mama sighed at this observation so I added, "Did he fall into it? Who died for his sins? Whose body did he eat? What about all those people between Miss Eve and Jesus?"

As the novel's title suggests, skin is a recurring motif, a physical sign of human life as well as a metaphor of human vulnerability. Wells' characters fascinate on both language, and her language explores their individual predicaments with a surgeon's precision and a poet's ear.