New Stories from the South 1999: The Year's Best - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 156512247X ISBN 13: 9781565122475

Publisher: Algonquin Books, 1999

Synopsis

It was an anthology that began simply enough: as a way to gather together the best kinds of writing going on in the South. It was also a way, back then, for editor Shannon Ravenel to keep tabs on who was writing what. Some of those voices that she heard first are now well-known: Barbara Kingsolver, Robert Olen Butler, Marly Swick, Rick Bass, Abraham Verghese, James Lee Burke, Larry Brown.

Our goal is still the same-to find the most original and affecting stories. And this year, in our newest tradition, we're pleased to include a preface by Tony Earley, which calls into question the message of one of the most-anthologized Southern stories of our time.

The 1999 edition gathers stories by: Michael Knight, Pinckney Benedict, Richard Schmitt, Clyde Edgerton, Andrew Alexander, Mary Clyde, Richard Bausch, Tony Earley, Michael Erard, Rick DeMarinis, Heather Sellers, Kurt Rheinheimer, Ingrid Hill, William Gay, Janice Daugharty, Mary Gordon, George Singleton, Tom Franklin

Laura Payne Butler, and Wendy Brenner.

An indispensable resource for aspiring writers, students, and readers of Southern fiction, New Stories from the South also includes the story behind each story. We continue to offer an updated list of magazines consulted by the editor, along with a complete list of all the stories selected each year since the series' inception, in 1986.

About this title

Review:

As any good Southerner knows, literature written on the sunnier side of the Mason-Dixon is every bit as diverse as literature anywhere else. Doubters need look no further than the latest edition of New Stories from the South, the acclaimed annual anthology edited by Shannon Ravenel. This year's version features well-known names such as Richard Bausch, Rick DeMarinis, and Clyde Edgerton right alongside up-and-coming talents such as Laura Payne Butler and Heather Sellers. Looking for monkeys? We got your monkey right here, ordered from the back of a comic book in Andrew Alexander's bittersweet short-short, "Little Bitty Pretty One." ("My father, a doctor, would pretend to examine the monkey when we asked him to. 'Have you been a good little boy?' he would say to the monkey over and over, and then answer in a high monkey-voice, 'Yes, I've been a good little boy.'") Naturally, there's a fair selection of Southern-style humor, from Clyde Edgerton's "Lunch at the Piccadilly," about persuading an elderly relative not to drive, to George Singleton's "Caulk," about a painting job taken just a little too far.

"Lookit: I swear it doesn't get 90 degrees at dawn in South Carolina during October.... One time my grandmother on my father's side said it reached 110 and rained simultaneously on Christmas day, 1950, but at that point she'd gone through both radiation and chemotherapy--she liked to pull the top of her dress down and show the cavity where one breast had existed, then say how smoking is bad for you."

Both the darkest and the most powerful story in this collection turns out to be Tom Franklin's Edgar Award-winning "Poachers," in which a legendary game warden turns the tables on a trio of half-wild backwoods boys who like to hunt out of season. African parrots and Crimson Tide football, circus animals and reattached feet: so many wild and wonderful tales, and not a stereotype among them. Southerners, the next time someone makes a Bubba joke in your presence, give 'em a copy of this anthology and tell them politely where they can place it. --Mary Park

From the Back Cover:

An honest look at the South

In this year's preface, Tony Earley writes, "It is easy to make up characters who live in double-wide mobile homes, wear beehive hairdos and feed caps, never put a g on the end of a participle, have sex with their cousins, voted for George Wallace, who squint and spit whenever an out-of-towner uses a polysyllabic word; who aspire only to own a bass boat, scare a Yankee, have sex with their cousins again, burn a cross, eat something fried, speak in tongues, do anything butt nekkid...What is difficult is to take the poor, the uneducated, the superstitious, the backward, the redneck, the 'trailer trash,' and make them real human beings, with hopes and dreams and aspirations as real and valid, and as worthy of our fair consideration, as any Cheeverian Westchester County housewife."

We couldn't agree more. Just as Tony Earley makes a plea for honest writing by challenging the stereotypes that wend their way through Southern literature, so Shannon Ravenel picks twenty singular writers who tell honest stories. Whether it's the Edgar-winning story of three orphaned brothers or the young girl who ends up in a strange motel room with a man she hardly knows or the old man who kills his son, every story here tells the honest truth about the South in unforgettable ways.

About this edition

• Publisher: Algonquin Books
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 156512247X
• ISBN 13: 9781565122475
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 306
• Editor: Ravenel Shannon