New Stories from the South 1997: The Year's Best - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1565121759 ISBN 13: 9781565121751

Publisher: Algonquin Books, 1997

Synopsis

The twelfth volume of the annual anthology is packed with nineteen entertaining stories. From a cautionary tale about the difficulties of loving a space alien to a new twist on a young Southerner's struggle in the wilds of Manhattan, these stories range from the hilarious to the poignant.

The preface, by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Robert Olen Butler, looks at what fiction is: "Fiction is, at its heart, the art form of human yearning."

The authors in the 1997 edition of New Stories are Gene Able, Dwight Allen, Edward Allen, Robert Olen Butler, Janice Daugharty, Ellen Douglas, Pam Durban, Charles East, Rhian Margaret Ellis, Tim Gautreaux, Elizabeth Gilbert, Lucy Hochman, Beauvais McCaddon, Dale Ray Phillips, Patricia Elam Ruff, Lee Smith, Judy Troy, Marc Vassallo, and Brad Vice.

About this title

About the Authors

ROBERT OLEN BUTLER is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of numerous novels and short story collections. He has twice won a National Magazine Award in Fiction and has received two Pushcart Prizes. He teaches creative writing at Florida State University.

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.

Reviews

The 11th installment in this excellent series is certainly one of the strongest, with 19 stories that capture the diversity of the South in voice and place, drawing on a range of old and new talents. The Old South of decaying mansions, men in seersucker, and women in lace is well recalled in first-rate tales by Charles East (``Pavane for a Dead Princess''), who meditates on the phenomenon of elderly ladies and their young male companions; by Pam Durban (``Gravity''), who beautifully records the decline of a once- distinguished Charleston family; and by Ellen Douglas (``Julia and Nellie''), who offers a tale of friendship transcending serious religious conflict. The rural and working-class South provides its own meaning and wistfulness: In Judy Troy's ``Ramone,'' a young girl relocates to the small Texas town where her stepfather's father lies dying; in Patricia Elam Ruff's moving and elegiac ``The Taxi Ride,'' an elderly woman, tired but happy in her long marriage, finds a welcome friend in a courtly cab-driver; in Janice Daugharty's ``Along a Wider River,'' a former sharecropper watches his old boss fumble and die while fishing; and in Rhian Margaret Ellis's ``Every Building Wants to Fall,'' a fatherless girl, feeling powerless and hopeless as well, discovers a perverse strength in causing her friend's epileptic seizures. Some inspired low comedy (and more class conflict) comes from two familiar experts: Tim Gautreaux's ``Little Frogs in a Ditch'' is a droll tale concerning a no-account loser who sells common roof pigeons as homing pigeons; and Lee Smith's unsparing ``Native Daughter'' turns on the conceit of its haughty narrator, a pretty girl from Kentucky who doesn't realize that her clubby male companions consider her easy trash. Robert Olen Butler's tetchy introduction--with its bristling at the notion of ``Southern'' fiction--insists on the universality of art, but his fears are misplaced. The superb stories here quietly demonstrate that the universal always resides in the particular. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

As Southern as Spanish moss on the bayou and the smell of sweet potato pie at a church picnic, this collection exemplifies the Southern experience. Editor Ravenel's 14th year of collecting the best Southern short stories proves to be an enjoyable read, placing this newest compilation in respectable company with previous editions. Veteran writers such as Lee Smith and Robert Olen Butler bring humor and insight to the mix, while newcomers like Marc Vassallo and Rhian Margaret Ellis offer realism and sadness brought on by family secrets and betrayals. Love with a space alien invades an Alabama town. Writer's block torments a native Southerner in the Big Apple. From the absurd to the ordinary, this anthology is a respectable body of witticisms, reminiscences, and observances propelled by a common Southern undercurrent. The healthiest of lives here encompass various aspects of pain, loss, joy, renewal, celebration, contentment, and serenity. Ravenel has gathered a healthy sampling of the human experience south of the Mason-Dixon line.?Shannon Williams Haddock, Bellsouth Corporate Lib. & Business Research Ctr., Birmingham, Ala.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Algonquin Books
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1565121759
• ISBN 13: 9781565121751
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 306
• Editor: Ravenel Shannon