Something Rich and Strange: Selected Stories
Author: Ron Rash
Date: 2014-11-04 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Short Stories; Fiction; Southern Gothic; Historical Fiction; Southern; Literary Fiction; Short Story Collection; Contemporary; Adult Fiction
Description: From the acclaimed, award-winning author of Serena and The Cove, thirty of his finest short stories, collected in one volume No one captures the complexities of Appalachia—a rugged, brutal landscape of exquisite beauty—as evocatively and indelibly as author and poet Ron Rash. Winner of the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, two O Henry prizes, and a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, Rash brilliantly illuminates the tensions between the traditional and the modern, the old and new south, tenderness and violence, man and nature. Though the focus is regional, the themes of Rash’s w
Publisher: Ecco

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Into Something Rich "2

by Loretta Cast and Strange we 8 January 2007

By Barth Anderson

It starts again. The baby begins to cough and

29 November 2004
choke. As soon as I realized that the rapacious, rot-sucking revenant would not stop till I was Locked Donte dead, I changed my phone number. I changed by Stephanie Burgis the locks on my windows, my doors, I let my beard grow out, and I changed— 1 January 2007

Wait. Let me rewind. The story of how I came to be known as the Great Bringweather really starts with the muffin—a luscious punk rocker with a strong geek for the guitar. Worse for me, he was a sullen misfit with placid brown eyes and soft hands.

You can never let anyone suspect, his mother told him. That was the first rule she taught him, and the last, before she left him here

alone with It. In short, he spun my heart like a pinwheel.

f Heroic Measures I met the muffin at a Chinese restaurant slash

dive called the White Monkey-Tiger. Lank, wax-black mohawk draped over half his face, he sat in a red vinyl booth surrounded by a cadre of what appeared to be either the members of a band or too-old-for-D&D boys

by Matthew Johnson 18 December 2006

Pale as he was, it was

(they were both, I later learned), all of them Hard Br on a tilting a pitcher of beer into their glasses and 2, 5 zn Even in the darkest

conversing with an irresistible intensity that

alerted me to the presence of the Holy Fire. Hines, She had evor

really feared for him; he

I was in my early seventies, young by the had always been strong, standards of my craft, but shy about leaping so strong. across the gulf between our years. It took ed he Tahe

several Fridays of sidling nearer, like a natural scientist earning the trust of lowland gorillas, but py Elizabeth Bear eventually, Devin (lead guitarist, Dungeon

Master, and delicious muffin-to-be) invited me 11 December 2006
to drink with them. I needn't have worried about _ ,
my age. We found a wide field of things to talk Nilufer raised her eyes to about: Norse mythology, Malcolm McLaren, Bis. It was not what skateboard technology (I mostly listened), and Women did to men, but Wagnerian opera. Over the next few weekends, She was a princess, and

I became a regular at their corner table. he was only a bandit. "I want to be a Witch," she

Then one Friday, Devin's band of said. "A Witch and not a musician-adventurers didn't show. It was just meQueen. I wish to be not and the muffin, and soon we were knee-deep in loved, but wise. Tell your his favorite topic, his yet-to-be-performed punk bandit lord, if he can give opera about King Arthur. Though he'd been me that, I might accept invited to submit it for a grant, he felt his libretto his gift."

was too breezy, didn't carry proper mythic weicht

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