New Stories from the South 2000: The Year's Best - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 156512295X ISBN 13: 9781565122956

Publisher: Algonquin Books, 2000

Synopsis

Whether it's the bodybuilder who picks up energy in the air, the rich girl who sees potential in the beer-drinking factory worker at her father's cardboard plant, the girl who turns against her evangelist father to find the real Jesus, the aunt with a withered arm who may have influenced Flannery O'Connor, the feminist scholar trying to reason with a good old boy, or the young MFA student determined to write a good story, this year's collection is about the connections these Southerners will to happen. Each story, as Ellen Douglas's thoughtful preface says, testifies to our need to "feel and understand the significance of the buzzing blooming dying chaos of our experience." This fifteenth edition is rich with unforgettable characters and full of great moments of comedy and tragedy.

Twenty writers tell their stories in this year's NSFS: A. Manette Ansay, Wendy Brenner, D. Winston Brown, Robert Olen Butler, Cathy Day, R.H.W. Dillard, Tony Earley, Clyde Edgerton, William Gay, Tim Gautreaux, Allan Gurganus, John Holman, Romulus Linney, Thomas H. McNeely, Christopher Miner, Chris Offutt, Margo Rabb, Karen Sagstetter, Mary Helen Stefaniak, Melanie Sumner

Each selection is accompanied by a look into the origin of the story. Readers will also find an updated list of magazines consulted by the editor for this edition and a complete list of all the stories selected each year since the series' genesis in 1986.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, 2000 tours the contemporary South better than any freight train, jet plane, or VW Bug. As Ellen Douglas muses in her preface to this year's collection, each story here helps us "feel and understand the significance of the buzzing blooming dying chaos of our experience."

-An adulterous couple, whose love is like a hard drug, drives to Nashville to face worse news than they could have foreseen.

-A box of kittens, discarded on the highway, becomes the bargaining chip in an unraveling marriage.

-A young man habitually waves back to a chronic "waver" on hi commute to work, even as he's perplexed by what the waving might mean.

Now in its fifteenth year, New Stories from the South is the most enduring, most read regional collection, or as Kirkus Reviews said, "one of the best story anthologies around."

About the Author:

Ellen Douglas is the pseudonym for Josephine Haxton, whose family roots extend back to the earliest settlements in Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana. Her fiction has won many prizes, including the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship, the Hillsdale Prize for Fiction from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award. She lives now in Jackson, Mississippi.

Shannon Ravenel has edited New Stories from the South since 1986. Formerly editorial director of Algonquin Books, she now directs her Algonquin imprint, Shannon Ravenel Books. She lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

About this edition

• Publisher: Algonquin Books
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 156512295X
• ISBN 13: 9781565122956
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320
• Editor: Ravenel Shannon