Burning Bright; Stories

New York: Ecco, An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, 2011. First Ecco Paperback Edition [stated]. First printing [stated]. Trade paperback. Good. Format is approximately 5.25 inches by 8 inches. [16], 207, [1] pages. Illustrated front cover. Autographed copy sticker on front cover. Signed by the author on the Half Title Page. Some discoloration inside the covers. Includes chapters on Hard Times; Back of Beyond; Dead Confederates, The Ascent, The Woman Who Believed in Jaguars, Burning Bright, Return, Into the Gorge, Falling Star; The Corpse Bird, Waiting for the End of the World, and Lincolnites. Also includes Acknowledgments. Winner of the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, Burning Bright captures the complexities of Appalachia—a rugged, brutal landscape of exceptional beauty, promise, and suffering that serves as New York Times bestselling author Ron Rash's muse. Spanning from the Civil War to the present day, Rash's historical and modern settings are sewn together in a haunting patchwork of suspense and myth, populated by raw and unforgettable characters mined from the landscape. "Into the Gorge" gathered a second O. Henry Prize for Rash, and, along with "The Ascent," was selected for the Best American Short Stories series. Those stories and "Back of Beyond" were also selected for the Best New Stories from the South series. Rash is the author of the 2009 PEN/Faulkner finalist and New York Times bestselling novel Serena, in addition to three other prizewinning novels, One Foot in Eden, Saints at the River, and the World Made Straight; three collections; and three collections of stories, among them Chemistry and Other Stories, which was a finalist for the 2007 PEN/Faulkner Award. Ron Rash (born September 25, 1953), an American poet, short story writer and novelist, is the Parris Distinguished Professor in Appalachian Cultural Studies at Western Carolina University. Rash's poems and stories have appeared in more than 100 magazines and journals. Serena received enthusiastic reviews across and beyond the United States. In addition to being a bestselling novelist, Rash has achieved international acclaim as a short story author. Recent work such as The Outlaws focused on ordinary lives in southern Appalachia. Scholars have praised his ability to find the universal within the particulars of place, citing his writing's "universal appeal, lyrical grace, and narrative efficiency." Jim Coby examined Rash's use of mystery thriller tropes in One Foot in Eden. While Rash's work certainly fits within the "Appalachian Noir" genre, a critic for the Atlanta Journal Constitution has asserted that "Rash belongs to the loftier realm of literary fiction." Derived from a review in Publishers Weekly: The latest collection, begins with "Hard Times," in which a struggling farmer in the midst of the Great Depression tries to discover who's stealing eggs from his henhouse without offending the volatile pride of his impoverished neighbors. The present-day stories are also situated in poverty-plagued small towns whose young citizens are being lost to meth addictions: in "Back of Beyond," a pawnshop owner has to intervene when he learns his nephew Danny has kicked his parents out of their house and sold off their furniture to support his habit; in "The Ascent," a young boy lovingly tends to a couple of corpses—victims of a small plane crash. Rash's stories are calm and dark. In "Dead Confederates," when a man falls into the Confederate tomb he's looting, the graveyard caretaker notes: "I'd say he's helped dig his own grave." With a mastery of dialogue, Rash has written a tribute and a pre-emptive eulogy for the hardworking, straight-talking farmers of the Appalachian Mountains.