Synopses & Reviews
For this year's volume, acclaimed writer ZZ Packer chooses some of the youngest and freshest voices on the literary horizon to accompany a host of well-established writers. And the stories they write tell of the South as it is now, the one not seen in the romanticized Southern fiction, but one where life is raw and risky. Here you'll find young girls encountering their first taste of corrupt adult world, a boy meeting his father for the first time, an uncle dealing with a nephew who's turned to meth. But this is still the South, and there is an alligator to be dealt with, a hurricane churning offshore, and the belief that a day at the beach can cure all.
As ZZ packer says in her introduction, "the sit-ins, the marches, the hope of better days…began in the South. Every other region can jam its fingers in its ears and shake its head and tunelessly chant 'Not in My Backyard,' but not so in the South. The South is the backyard. And as backward as we've been portrayed—or as backward as we've sometimes portrayed ourselves, slipping behind a curtain of innocent and naïve agrarianism, rural somnolence, and sleepy everlasting vowels—the truth is that every awful and beautiful thing that has happened in America happened in the South first." You'll feel the pulse of the South coursing through every one of her selections.
Review
"The spirit of play is at work in this lively latest crop of Southern stories gamely chosen by fiction writer Gurganus...Skillful vernacular storytelling and writing with heart mark many of these selections...a buoyant mix of gravitas and levity...a delight to savor."
—Kirkus Kirkus Reviews
Review
“The absolute best in short literary fiction.”—Pages magazine Pages Magazine
Review
“A formidable and diverse group of talent between the covers of a single volume.” —The Charleston Post and Courier The Charleston Post and Courier
Review
"For 20 years, the spectacular Shannon Ravenel edited
New Stories from the South, an annual collection of the best regional fiction. Extolling writers who favor risk-taking ('broadjumps into the great unknown'), Ravenel's successor, novelist Allan Gurganus (no mean risk-taker himself), presents stories as offbeat as Cary Holladay's chilling anatomy of racism, 'The Burning,' and Keith Lee Morris's eerie odyssey, 'Tired Heart.' Tradition with an edgy, modern twist."
—O, the Oprah magazine O, the Oprah magazine
Review
"
New Stories from the South is a literary anthology of the all-star variety."
—Miami Herald Miami Herald
Review
"….One of the pleasures of reading "New Stories From the South," year after year, is discovering new talent, writers who have not yet published a book. . . . In "New Stories From the South 2007 --- The Year's Best," Edward P. Jones' story sense pays off."—Atlanta Journal Constitution Atlanta Journal Constitution
Review
"A suitably hospitable anthology, with an author comment, beneath his or her photo, at the end of each story." —Washington Post The Washington Post
Review
"This is an evocative selection of 18 stories for those sons and daughters of the South who yearn for fiction that eschews the moonlight-and-magnolias claptrap. In his excellent introduction, novelist Edward P. Jones (The Known World) explores his original discomfort at being asked to edit a book of Southern short stories since he is a native of Washington, D.C. He asks: How do we define the South today? Traditional big hitters are featured: Rick Bass, James Lee Burke, Alan Gurganus and Tim Gautreaux, whose "The Safe" is outstanding. But the real excitement is reading stories by up-and-coming writers, such as National Book Award finalist Joshua Ferris.”--USA Today
Synopsis
We launch into our third decade by welcoming a guest editorand#8212;to select and introduce each yearand#8217;s collectionand#8212;and who better to inaugurate the change than Allan Gurganus. He has combed through hundreds of short stories written in 2005 to assemble a muscular array of talent, twenty stories ranging from low-down, high-octane farce to dark, erotic suspense.
This yearand#8217;s volume combines seasoned writers like Tony Earley, Wendell Berry, and George Singleton with gifted newcomers, including Keith Lee Morris, Erin Brooks Worley and J. D. Chapman. Their stories range from a communal love poem for a hunting dog, to a tale of a newly rich retiree trying to micromanage a Hollywood movie and losing his trophy wife to each new young screenwriter, to a harrowing work about a Virginia slave-woman burned alive for witchcraft.
As Gurganus writes in his introduction, and#8220;The only region of the U.S. ever to declare war on every other region of the nation wonand#8212;if not that great gray fib of secession, then most of the recuperating countryand#8217;s truest stories.and#8221
Synopsis
This year, acclaimed short-story writer ZZ Packer chooses twenty distinctive stories representing the great number of voices and narratives coming out of the South. Some of the youngest and freshest talents on the literary horizon—Bret Anthony Johnston, Kevin Brockmeier, Holly Goddard Jones—accompany well-known Southern stalwarts, including Pinckney Benedict, Clyde Edgerton, and Ron Rash. Their stories tell of life as it is now, a life not seen in romanticized Southern fiction, one where existence—both urban and rural—is as raw and risky as it is alluring. The energy of this collection courses through every one of Packer's edgy, funny, and gritty selections.
About the Author
Edward P. Jones has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and the Lannan Literary Award for The Known World. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2004, and his first collection of short stories, Lost in the City, won the PEN/Hemingway Award and was short-listed for the National Book Award. His most recent collection, All Aunt Hagar's Children, has become a bestseller.Allan Gurganus’s first novel, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, was a New York Times bestseller and has been translated into twelve languages. His novel White People was the winner of the Los Angeles Book Prize and was a PEN/Faulkner finalist, and his short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, the Atlantic, and the Paris Review and has been anthologized in the The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Short Stories, The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, and New Stories from the South. He is a 2006 John Simon Guggenheim Fellow.Z.Z. Packer's first collection, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and a New York Times Notable Book, and was selected by John Updike for the Today Show Book Club. She has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction, a Whiting Writers' Award, and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award. Packer is on the faculty of California College of the Arts, and her stories have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories and New Stories from the South.Kathy Pories earned her B.A. and Ph.D. in English Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She taught in the English Department at UNC and at Elon University before joining Algonquin in 1995. She lives in Durham, North Carolina.
Table of Contents
Introduction by ZZ Packer
Holly Goddard Jones, Theory of Realty
Pinckney Benedict, Bridge of Sighs
Amina Gautier, The Ease of Living
Kevin Moffett, First Marriage
Robert Drummond, The Unnecessary Man
Stephanie Soileau, So This Is Permanence
Clyde Edgerton, The Great Speckled Bird
Ron Rash, Back of Beyond
Merritt Tierce, Suck It
R.T. Smith, Wretch Like Me
Karen E. Bender, Candidate
David James Poissant, Lizard Man
Daniel Wallace, The Girls
Jim Tomlinson, First Husband, First Wife
Bret Anthony Johnston, Republican
Mary Miller, Leak
Charlie Smith, Albemarle
Jennifer Moses, Child of God
Stephanie Dickinson, Lucky Seven & Dalloway
Kevin Brockmeier, Andrea Is Changing Her Name