Susan Straight's prose is as innocent and hard as the lives of the people she loves. It is this love for her characters-unidealized, tangible, as deep as time-that makes her story so extraordinary. Little of moment happens: A woman lies next to her man at dawn and thinks about his back, yet in the evocation…
Deborah Joy Corey's narrators take control as soon as they get behind the wheel of her stories. They pull you into their pickup trucks, or vintage white Cadillacs, or baby blue DeSotos and slam the door. And there you are looking at their world through cracked and dusty windshields, living their lives, drivin' the Vitamin…
With gratitude I recommend to readers this story written by a writer who was a young man in the sixties in America, and who survived the colliding hopes and promises, and the shattering of so many of them, the shattering even of the very sources of so many of them, during that time in our…
Amanda Pierson has a good eye, a fine ear, and a wanderer's heart. Born and raised in Princeton, New Jersey, Amanda traveled south following her graduation from Dartmouth College, and it is there-in the climate of Porter and Faulkner-that she began to discover her voice as a writer. Much has been made of the verbal…
I met Noy Holland six years ago at a writers' conference at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, where Barry Hannah wild man stories were still rife, though he had been gone from there a couple of years. The title of the conference was Voicelust, and Tuscaloosa, lush with boredom, marital breakup, dog racing, the…
I • THE VAST SLEEP OF THINGS 1 Carthage Is Burning If only this sleep could be wind, I told myself, a dark stirring of it out of Egypt, the wind which rots all sails and cannot rot and is beyond age-not the scirocco with its one obsession; not the chinook thawing the ice on…
Lucky indeed is the young writer who has a background like Josip Novaikovich. No shortage of something to write about. Listen. He grew up in Yugoslavia, the son of a clog-maker in a mountain town. Matters got complicated, seeing that his family was of a small group of Baptists in a Communist country that was…
In language both sensitive and terse, "Close to Autumn" explores the feelings of a motherless child. Edie is seven and long accustomed to living alone with her agreeable, devoted young father. She shyly admires his new girlfriend, too, and comes to cherish moments when the three of them can be together. But she is unaccountably…
I first met Wayne Johnson's "Red Deer" during my fiction writing class at Iowa in the fall of 1986. Among the students in that class were two young men who wrote exclusively about themes that have come to be associated with the American West. The majority of students in the class were Easterners, and they…
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