Review:
New Stories from the South is now in its 17th year, and once again editor Shannon Ravenel offers a broad sampling of the region's best work. With an introduction by Larry Brown, the 2002 edition includes 19 stories by authors like Russell Banks, as well as lesser-known talents. Set as far back as the Civil War (Dulane Upshaw Ponder's "The Rat Spoon") and as recently as the present, the 2002 collection places a heavy emphasis, intentional or not, on themes of loss and reconciliation. Some stories have dark and violent outcomes reminiscent of Joyce Carol Oates's work, such as William Gay's "Charting the Territories of the Red" and Brad Barkley's "Beneath the Deep Slow Motion." Others tackle spiritual encounters at the end of lives lived with good intentions, like Aaron Gwyn's "Of Falling" and Lucia Nevai's "Faith Healer." Kate Small's "Maximum Sunlight," about a young Vietnamese woman's assimilation into Washington D.C., is a particularly lyrical piece about race in the South, while Andrea Lee's "Anthropology," about two black intellectuals reconciling their heritage, takes a more playful tone. In almost all cases, the stories show men and women struggling to remake themselves in the face of their realities. Similarly, these stories reinvent the Southern short story, one paragraph at a time, much as the South they depict continues its own slow reinvention. --Jane Hodges
About the Author:
Larry Brown was born in Lafayette County, Mississippi, where he lived all his life. At the age of thirty, a captain in the Oxford Fire Department, he decided to become a writer and worked toward that goal for seven years before publishing his first book, Facing the Music, a collection of stories, in 1988. With the publication of his first novel, Dirty Work, he quit the fire station in order to write full time. (The nonfiction book On Fire tells the story of his many years as a firefighter.) Between then and his untimely death in 2004, he published seven more books. He was awarded the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters award for fiction and was the first two-time winner of the Southern Book Award for Fiction, which he won in 1992 for Joe, and again in 1997 for Father and Son. He was the recipient of a Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Award and Mississippi's Governor's Award For Excellence in the Arts. The story "Big Bad Love" became the basis for a feature film, as did his novel Joe.
Shannon Ravenel has edited New Stories from the South since 1986. Formerly editorial director of Algonquin Books, she now directs her Algonquin imprint, Shannon Ravenel Books. She lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
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