Miracle Boy and Other Stories - Softcover

Benedict, Pinckney

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1935708015 ISBN 13: 9781935708018

Publisher: Press 53, 2010

Synopsis

Miracle Boy and Other Stories represents a body of work eighteen years in the making. Benedict's last short story collection was the critically acclaimed The Wrecking Yard, published in 1992 by Nan A. Talese. That collection was followed by the Steinbeck Award-winning crime novel Dogs of God, also from Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, in 1994, which Marilyn Stasio said was written "in a vein of rare, wild beauty .... with the lyrical exactitude of Henry Thoreau on a metaphysical field trip to hell." Miracle Boy and Other Stories is a collection of fourteen stories. many of which earned appearances in The O.Henry Awards, New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, The Pushcart Prize: The Best of Small Presses, The Best of Tin House, and Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Elizabeth Strout, winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Olive Kittridge, says, "These are amazing stories. They contain the exquisite beauty of poetry and the dense muscularity of a language that takes the reader to breathtaking heights. Never complaining, or flinching, Pinckney Benedict presses us right against the variety of human experience in ways I've never seen before. There is not a story here that is not the real thing."

About this title

About the Author

Pinckney Benedict grew up on his family's dairy farm in the mountains of southern West Virginia. He has published two collections of short fiction and a novel. His stories have appeared in Esquire, Zoetrope: All-Story, the O. Henry Award series, the New Stories from the South series, the Pushcart Prize series, The Oxford Book of American Short Stories, and The Ecco Anthology of Contemporary American Short Fiction.

Review

The first novel by storywriter Benedict (Town Smokes, 1987; The Wrecking Yard, 1992) barely resembles his measured and lyrical short fiction. Benedict owes more here to action movies than to any literary source: the levels of violence and the plot improbabilities have the same nihilistic drive of a Peckinpah film. In Benedict's West Virginia, the smell of death pervades the air, and wild dogs and boars rule the uninhabited forest. Government land, long abandoned, now serves the local drug lords, who import South American laborers to harvest their best cash crop: marijuana. Into this corrupt mountain community stumbles Goody, a good but troubled bare-fisted boxer who once killed a man in a dirty match. * Kirkus Reviews * Benedict, who lives in West Virginia, is the author of two highly regarded short story collections, Town Smokes and The Wrecking Yard. In this, his first novel, individual chapters have the compression of short stories, but he fails to maintain a novel-length narrative flow, and none of his characters sustain interest for the book's 300-plus pages. Still, his language is vivid and assured, his dialogue is skillfully written and convincing, and he creates an atmosphere of unsettling strangeness. * Booklist * In this first novel, Benedict continues his exploration of rural West Virginia life begun in his two short story collections, The Wrecking Yard and Town Smokes. As in the short stories, the writing here is strong and vivid. The wide cast of characters includes Goody (a boxer), Dwight (a tourist guide), drug enforcement agents, marijuana growers, gunrunners, illegal immigrants, and a variety of lost and corrupt souls. They live and die in an atmosphere of bleakness and despair, with violence and brutality as constant companions. * Library Journal * In this taut, muscular thriller set in contemporary rural West Virginia, short-story writer Benedict (The Wrecking Yard) hurtles the reader toward a chillingly apocalyptic climax replete with high-tech weaponry and old-fashioned treachery. Peopled with an assortment of New South grotesques, the story centers on Goody, a young bare-fisted fighter new to the neighborhood, and Tannhauser, a deranged, 12-fingered backwoods drug lord with a penchant for sadism. * Publishers Weekly * Benedict's first collection of stories since his auspicious if uneven debut (Town Smokes, 1987) is a far more accomplished work, establishing him among the best young southern writers - full of passion and mature enough to keep it under control. Benedict searches out the moral dimension in the hardscrabble lives of rednecks and country people, and transcends the folksy bromides they espouse. He discerns the confusion and ambiguities in their seemingly uncomplicated lives. * Kirkus Reviews * An often heart-stopping literary performance. * The New York Times * What Beattie did for urbanites, Cheever and Updike for suburbanites, a younger generation Omstead, Abbott, Cullen, and now Benedict is doing for the rural population. Only 22 and recipient of the 1986 Nelson Algren Award, Benedict has published stories in the Chicago Tribune and Ontario Review. His world is regional, tough, raw, male; these nine stories deal with the mountain men, sheep farmers, and hog raisers of rural West Virginia. * Library Journal * Benedict evokes the world of hard-bitten Southern men who live in shabby weatherbeaten houses or rickety trailers, who work in tire factories or slaughterhouses, who are slow to speak but quick to explode in anger, and whose women are tangential figures. * Publishers Weekly *

About this edition

• Publisher: Press 53
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1935708015
• ISBN 13: 9781935708018
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 260