Burning Bright - Softcover

Rash, Ron

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0857861174 ISBN 13: 9780857861177

Publisher: Canongate Books, 2012

Synopsis

A FARMER and his wife fall on hard times. They haven't lost everything the way others have, but they have lost enough. Their hope for a better future comes under threat when they discover an intruder on their land.

A WOMAN from a small town marries an outsider. Her love for him battles with her suspicions that he is the source of the fires ravaging the mountains.

A YOUNG BOY, neglected by his parents, sits in the remains of a crashed plane and lovingly tends to two frozen bodies.

These remarkable stories and many more can be found in Burning Bright, an award-winning collection that captures the complexities of a place and conjures characters that will burn bright in your mind long after you have finished reading.

About this title

From the Back Cover

New York Times bestselling and award-winning author Ron Rash is "a storyteller of the highest rank" (Jeffrey Lent) and has won comparisons to John Steinbeck, Cormac McCarthy, and Gabriel García Márquez. It is rare that an author can capture the complexities of a place as though it were a person, and rarer still that one can reveal a land as dichotomous and fractious as Appalachia—a muse; a siren; a rugged, brutal landscape of exceptional beauty, promise, and suffering—with the honesty and precision of a photograph. "If you haven't heard of the Southern writer Ron Rash, it is time you should" (The Plain Dealer).

In Burning Bright, the stories span the years from the Civil War to the present day, and Rash's historical and modern settings are sewn together in a hauntingly beautiful patchwork of suspense and myth, populated by raw and unforgettable characters mined from the landscape of Appalachia. In "Back of Beyond," a pawnshop owner who profits from the stolen goods of local meth addicts—including his own nephew—comes to the aid of his brother and sister-in-law when they are threatened by their son. The pregnant wife of a Lincoln sympathizer alone in Confederate territory takes revenge to protect her family in "Lincolnites." And in the title story, a woman from a small town marries an outsider; when an unknown arsonist starts fires in the Smoky Mountains, her husband becomes the key suspect.

In these stories, Rash brings to light a previously unexplored territory, hidden in plain sight—first a landscape, and then the dark yet lyrical heart and the alluringly melancholy soul of his characters and their home.

About the Author

Ron Rash is the author of the 2009 PEN/Faulkner finalist and New York Times bestseller Serena and Above the Waterfall, in addition to four prizewinning novels, including The Cove, One Foot in Eden, Saints at the River, and The World Made Straight; four collections of poems; and six collections of stories, among them Burning Bright, which won the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and Chemistry and Other Stories, which was a finalist for the 2007 PEN/Faulkner Award. Twice the recipient of the O. Henry Prize, he teaches at Western Carolina University.

Edition details

• Publisher: Canongate Books
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0857861174
• ISBN 13: 9780857861177
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224