Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail
Stories
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
In this remarkable book, the author of Shiloh and Other Stories, In Country, and other award-winning books gives us powerful new stories that capture the restless energy of life in contemporary America. The characters here are travelers and seekers, feeling their way toward, or away from the defining moments of their lives. They roam out into the world to England, Alaska, Texas, Saudi Arabia, or ricochet back home to Kentucky, ceaselessly searching, exploring, testing for limits.
I felt strange, says Chrissy in With Jazz, as though all my life I had been zigzagging down a wild trail to this particular place. In Charger, a teenage boy races along the interstate, seeking the father who abandoned him years before. In Rolling into Atlanta, a young woman searches for the kind of authenticity she remembers from her rural childhood. In Proper Gypsies, Nancy deals with the shock of being robbed in London. In The Funeral Side, Sandra comes home to try to fulfill her responsibilities to her family, but yearns to escape again to Alaska and the northern lights that haunt her. Writing in the spare, precise, beautifully nuanced language for which she is famous, Bobbie Ann Mason expands her art here in dramatic and illuminating fashion.
These fascinating stories bring to life surprising individuals whose journeys shine a bright light on life as it is lived by many Americans today. Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail is a beautiful book by one of America's finest writers, a book full of drama, humor, and startling insights into the timeless longings of the human heart.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Over the years, Mason has perfected a writerly version of method acting. As in her novels In Country and Feather Crowns, and her previous story collection, Shiloh and Other Stories, here again Mason inhabits a cast of characters who at first seem utterly defined by a world that doesn't get any larger than a small orbit of towns and country around Lexington, Ky. In the best of these 11 stories, Mason shows how deep and subtle truths can pop up anywhere and be conveyed in local dialect. Shed of two husbands and four children, the middle-aged female protagonist of "With Jazz" embarks on a casual affair with a married man called Jazz. Musing on the fruits of a long past, she feels "lost somewhere between being nice and being mean." Annie, the protagonist of "Rolling into Atlanta," works as a corporate spy, posing as a waitress, but finds herself growing attached to the headwaiter of the restaurant she's investigating. In "Three Wheeler," a potter is pestered by neighborhood boys until she one-ups them on their own turf. Not every story is so well crafted that its truths feel organic. In "Proper Gypsies," a woman borrows a friend's flat in London to regroup after a split from a lover. When the flat is burgled, the woman's feelings of wonderment and cultural displacement flare, culminating in a picturesque yet slightly contrived montage of cultural change ending with an image of a younger self seeing through a glass darkly. Mason's latest work demonstrates that the finest writers aren't afraid to think small. 11-city author tour. (On-sale: Aug. 7)
