Dancing By The River $25.00
Savannah, GA: Frederic C. Beil (2005)
Marlin Barton’s Dancing by the River is a superb collection of stories about the fascinating complexities of life in a small community. Winner of the O. Henry Award and the Andrew Lytle Prize, Barton has been called “one of the most distinctive new voices in Southern fiction,” and this book, which entails the whole history of the community, proves that he is a masterful observer of family relations and the idiosyncratic logic that governs human lives. His writing does not call attention to itself – it is simple, powerful, and so fluid that it seems almost effortless.
A companion volume to The Dry Well, Marlin Barton’s first collection of stories, the stories of Dancing by the River stand on their own, and prove that this is a book that is a gift for every reader ready to discover a vibrant sensibility fully engaged with the South.
Thursday April 2, 2015
Signing: 5:00
Reading: 5:30
Pasture Art $16.95
Spartanburg, SC; Hub City Press (2015)
These stories, all set in nearby towns in the Alabama Black Belt a swath of dark soil that runs west to east through the central part of the state explore the history, culture, and human spirit of the people who live there, and those that came before them and were shaped by the same rich and corrupted geography. In the title story, a teenage girl wants desperately to escape her self-destructive mother and comes to realize the hay-bale art she can see from their house may hold a key to her future, if she can divine it. The novella “Playing War” tells the story of a wife who’s just learned the hunting accident her husband was involved in years earlier was not exactly an accident. “Haints at Noon,” written in the form of a 1930s slave narrative, tells the story of a couple trying to endure that “peculiar institution.” Another story, “Into Silence,” which was included in Best American Short Stories 2010, gives voice to a woman who is deaf and mute as she tries to break the bonds of her domineering mother when a traveling photographer, working for the WPA, rents a room in their home. The past and present are joined here in stories that demonstrate the never-ending struggle for understanding and connection.