New Stories from the South 2009

In the twenty-fourth volume of this distinguished anthology, Madison Smartt Bell chooses twenty-one distinctive pieces of short fiction to tell the story of the South as it is now. This is a South that is still recognizable but no longer predictable. As he says, "to the traditional black and white recipe (ever a tricky and volatile mixture) have been added new shades and strains from Asia and Central and South America and just about everywhere else on the shrinking globe." Just as Katrina brought out into the open all the voices of New Orleans, so the South is now many things, both a distinctive region and a place of rootlessness. It's these contradictions that Madison Smartt Bell has captured in this provocative and moving collection of stories.

Here you'll find the well-known—Wendell Berry, Elizabeth Spencer, Jill McCorkle—alongside those writers just making their debuts, in stories that show the South we always thought we knew, making itself over, and over.

Publishers Weekly

Hurricane Katrina hangs like tendrils of Spanish moss over this uneven anthology of Southern fiction. The storm and its aftermath is most skillfully handled by Katherine Karlin in “Muscle Memory,” where Destiny, whose father drowned in the flood, tries to learn welding in the shipyard where her father worked. Her fight is far more moving than Stephanie Dickinson’s “Love City,” in which Katrina feels shoehorned into a story of poverty and anger. Best are George Singleton’s “Between Wrecks,” imbued with a strong sense of the everyday bizarre and dark Southern wit and peopled by a fake arrowhead dealer and grave robbers; and “Family Museum of the Ancient Postcards” by Stephanie Powell Watts, with its perceptive young narrator and the secrets she keeps for her aunt Ginny. There are some strong, original and revealing stories that offer a different and new way of viewing the South, but far too many are technically sound but bloodless. (Aug.)

Whether he's writing about the Haitian Revolution or a white Tae Kwon Do teacher in the Baltimore ghetto, Madison Smartt Bell can be extraordinarily flexible while maintaining his simple but poetic way with language. As the New York Times Book Review once put it, "[Bell] has an uncanny understanding of the way many people must struggle to live."