New Stories by Southern Women [Paperback]

Mary E. Gibson (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 1989

This collection brings together twenty-one stories by women who grew up in the South and have published important fiction in the last decade. It is the first such collection of fiction by southern women, and it comes at a time when southern women writers can see themselves as part of a distinguished and distinctive tradition. Collected here are stories that represent the variety of southern life-from house trailers to condominiums, from rural to urban settings. They analyze, often explicitly from a woman's point of view, the dailiness of life, the nature of living within a social fabric that may seem hopelessly torn but that someone must repair. Although they vary significantly in tone and focus, common themes emerge-families, their food and communal culture; their disintegration and reconstitution in a changing culture; and relationships between women and men, between mothers and children, between women, between the classes. Often unassuming in tone, but always technically accomplished, these stories indicate the breadth and power of current writing by southern women.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The Southern literary imagination courts unusual breadth in this collection, taking in wry minimalism (Bobbie Ann Mason), incantatory prose poetry (Jayne Anne Phillips), modern-day lesbian love (Shirley Ann Grau) and timeless backwoods poverty (Mary Hood), while conveying the profound sense of place and romantic intensity traditional to the South. Among the best of 21 stories (14 have been anthologized previously) are Alice Adams's "Return Trips," set in Yugoslavia and Hilton (a small Southern town), and telling of the compromises aging demands; Ellen Gilchrist's "Music," concerning a 14-year-old "Miss Smart-alecky Movie Star" who runs amok in Clay County, Ky.; and "Indian Summer" by Elizabeth Spencer, about seemingly irreparable family feuding ("To start really conversing with a parent for the first time must be as strange an experience as falling in love"). Gibson ( History and the Prism of Art: Browning's Poetic Experiment ) has chosen wisely in ranging widely, avoiding provincialism in a regional guise.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Paperback: 302 pages
• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press (July 1, 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0872496341
• ISBN-13: 978-0872496347
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,467,200 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)