Finely nuanced hymn to the world before Ikea, and the stout West Virginians who peopled it. Recommended.
Ayer (Tales of Chinkapin Creek, 2011) returns with more sparkling sketches of rural West Virginians who lived by their hands, hearts and wits before the age of machines.
Life in the Mountain State in the early 1900s was blessed but hard—even for Nellie Wister, the eldest daughter of prominent farmer Jack and homemaker extraordinaire Carrie, who together raised five children while presiding over hired hands and serving girls who might have graced the set of Upstairs Downstairs, the Appalachia edition. As in her debut volume of stories, Ayer recreates the titular riverine patch in a series of sketches told by Nellie. To the Wister homestead come vendors, gypsies, widows and farm boys marked by solitude, struggle or need—sometimes all three. Yet Nellie’s nostalgia can be as devilishly wry as it is deeply profound. When indoor plumbing is installed on the farm, unflattering misadventures follow. Later, an impending trip to Baltimore sparks a sewing marathon that hushes the household for days. Oddballs with hard-luck stories emerge. There’s the blacksmith, Robert E. Lee Kilgore, a tortured soul who forges a macabre legacy, and the pacifist basket weaver, Levi Eads, who recounts a deadly appointment at Antietam. Ayer’s prose is accomplished throughout, and her details intoxicate—from a blind organ tuner’s flylike fingers and tiny tools to a corpse’s wrinkled trousers. Yet a tendency to summarize occasionally dilutes the drama of otherwise well-told tales. That, and some sentimental stretches, make this a slightly shallower Creek than its predecessor. But only slightly. Especially rich is the author’s descriptive language: The dew before sunrise that cures freckles; the ring of blackberries that sprouted from a lightning strike; the echoing pop of exploding pig bladders announcing well-being to distant neighbors; calf’s jelly and horehound lozenges and leather baseballs fashioned from balls of socks. This is a book to be read much as one would listen to a reed organ, hearing beyond its deep tones high piano notes that herald the changing timbre of a new age.
Finely nuanced hymn to the world before Ikea, and the stout West Virginians who peopled it. Recommended.Pub Date: June 27, 2012
ISBN: 978-1470135799
Page Count: 168
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The range and virtuosity of these stories make this Mosley’s most adventurous and, maybe, best book.
A grandmaster of the hard-boiled crime genre shifts gears to spin bittersweet and, at times, bizarre tales about bruised, sensitive souls in love and trouble.
In one of the 17 stories that make up this collection, a supporting character says: “People are so afraid of dying that they don’t even live the little bit of life they have.” She casually drops this gnomic observation as a way of breaking down a lead character’s resistance to smoking a cigarette. But her aphorism could apply to almost all the eponymous awkward Black men examined with dry wit and deep empathy by the versatile and prolific Mosley, who takes one of his occasional departures from detective fiction to illuminate the many ways Black men confound society’s expectations and even perplex themselves. There is, for instance, Rufus Coombs, the mailroom messenger in “Pet Fly,” who connects more easily with household pests than he does with the women who work in his building. Or Albert Roundhouse, of “Almost Alyce,” who loses the love of his life and falls into a welter of alcohol, vagrancy, and, ultimately, enlightenment. Perhaps most alienated of all is Michael Trey in “Between Storms,” who locks himself in his New York City apartment after being traumatized by a major storm and finds himself taken by the outside world as a prophet—not of doom, but, maybe, peace? Not all these awkward types are hapless or benign: The short, shy surgeon in “Cut, Cut, Cut” turns out to be something like a mad scientist out of H.G. Wells while “Showdown on the Hudson” is a saga about an authentic Black cowboy from Texas who’s not exactly a perfect fit for New York City but is soon compelled to do the right thing, Western-style. The tough-minded and tenderly observant Mosley style remains constant throughout these stories even as they display varied approaches from the gothic to the surreal.
The range and virtuosity of these stories make this Mosley’s most adventurous and, maybe, best book.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4956-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
The spirit of grace under pressure and creativity under fire animates a wonderfully diverse set of stories.
Ng selects 20 stories that illustrate why we might still read fiction in a time of disinformation and lies.
As the trials and tribulations of the 21st century have unfolded, the Best American Short Stories anthology has become a particular way of taking the temperature of each passing year. As Ng writes in her introduction to the latest group, “Short stories in particular can act like little tuning forks, helping us to clarify our own values—then allowing us to bring ourselves into alignment with what we believe. In a time when our values are being tested daily, it’s hard to think of anything more important.” Many of them are also fun to read, a quality appreciated more than ever by depressed and overwhelmed readers. The stories are ordered alphabetically, a structure maintained in the following selection, which is unfortunately limited by space. “Take Me to Kirkland,” by Sarah Anderson, is very funny, a little weird, and certainly one of Costco’s finest hours. “What Would I Do for You, What Would You Do for Me?” by Emma Binder is a cinematic mini-thriller about a trans kid visiting his hometown, terrified of being “clocked” by the people he grew up with after he saves a local from drowning. “Time of the Preacher,” by Bret Anthony Johnston, is one of several pandemic stories—in it, a snake, which may or may not be under the refrigerator, inspires a quarantine-breaking cry for help from a fence-builder’s ex-wife. Another story of that time, “Yellow Tulips,” by Nathan Curtis Roberts, also combines endearing, funny first-person narration with a more serious theme. A Mormon man in an uptight Utah suburb has to manage his developmentally disabled adult son through the complexities of quarantine. One day, he discovers that his son has “gotten into the provisions Mormons are all but commanded to keep, eating Nutella and Marshmallow Fluff from their jars.…Brig, we put these things aside for the apocalypse,’” the father says, while his son “grinned gleefully, sugary goo smeared across his lips and fingers. ‘It’s an apocalypse now!’”
The spirit of grace under pressure and creativity under fire animates a wonderfully diverse set of stories.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780063399808
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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