Town Smokes - Softcover

Benedict, Pinckney

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0865380589 ISBN 13: 9780865380585

Publisher: Ontario Review Press, 2002

Synopsis

The debut collection by one of our foremost younger fiction writers.

A widely hailed first collection of stories set mostly in the rural South.

About this title

About the Author:

Pinckney Benedict was born in 1964, attended Princeton University and graduated from the creative writing programme at the University of Iowa. He currently lives in West Virginia on the family dairy farm where he grew up. He is the author of another collection of stories, The Wrecking Yard, and a novel, Dogs of God, for which he won the Steinbeck Award.

From Publishers Weekly:

In these nine stories, 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. Benedict deftly delineates his characters and has a good ear for the cadence of Southern speech. But the stories, although powerful, are too grim to be read in one sitting. Most include gory if not violent events: the shooting and flaying of a snake in "The Sutton Pie Safe"; the killing of a hog in "Booze";a barroom fight in "Hackberry"; and various episodes of stabbing, shooting and dogfighting in "Pit." The title story is as bleak as the others: a mountain teenager is robbed of some of his dead father's possessions at gunpoint as he walks to town to buy cigarettes. At 22, the author is a talent to watch, but one hopes that he injects a note of lightness into future stories.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Ontario Review Press
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0865380589
• ISBN 13: 9780865380585
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 168