Ron Rash

Rash returns to short fiction with 13 snapshots of contemporary Appalachia. There are double-wide trailers, aging cars and lost souls "resigned to bad times and trouble," but there's also, in "Honesty," a lit professor struggling to get out from under his rich, cynical wife. In the title story, a chemistry teacher prescribed Elavil and shock treatments for a "chemical imbalance" seeks emotional ballast in the backwoods evangelical religion of his youth.

"When a twelve-year-old girl drowns in the Tamassee River and her body is trapped in a deep eddy, the small South Carolina town that bears the river's name becomes the center of a far-reaching controversy. Anxious to recover the body and give their daughter a proper burial, the girl's parents want to send divers down into the rain-swollen currents. But a contingent of environmentalists is opposed to the rescue, convinced that it will damage the riverbed, violate conservation laws, and set a dangerous precedent." "Maggie Glenn, a twenty-eight-year-old newspaper photographer born in Tamassee but long since moved away, is assigned to cover the story. Back in her hometown, she's forced to confront not only her ailing and embittered father, but the friends and relatives who have taken sides against one another. Complicating matters further are an old boyfriend - now the charismatic leader of the group protesting the rescue - and the reporter sent to cover the story alongside her, a man with painful associations of his own that may threaten the relationship they've recently begun. And as the family history she's so successfully repressed threatens to surface, Maggie finds she is herself vulnerable to the painful implications of the conflict - questions of integrity, loyalty to home and family, and to the past."--BOOK JACKET.

Estranged for decades after a turbulent 1969 summer spent with a free-spirited redhead, two brothers are forced by a shocking reminder to confront the past events that divided them.

A short novel written in an experimental blend of play and novel. The story is a simple morality play set in a circus. When an ageing man’s young wife suspects that her husband is sterile she decides to seduce his young assistant solely to become pregnant, wanting to give her husband the child he craves. When the husband discovers the truth he must come to terms with his pride.

A young girl loves to listen to the voices of the sea and play with the teeth the sharks leave for her, but as she grows up she decides it was all her imagination--until one day she returns to the house where she grew up.

"The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth was originally released in 1994 and was the first published book from acclaimed writer Ron Rash. This twentieth anniversary edition takes us back to where it all began with ten linked short stories, framed like a novel, introducing us to a trio of memorable narrators--Tracy, Randy, and Vincent--making their way against the hardscrabble backdrop of the North Carolina foothills. With a comedic touch that may surprise readers familiar only with Rash's later, darker fiction, these earnest tales reveal the hard lessons of good whiskey, bad marriages, weak foundations, familial legacies, questionable religious observances, and the dubious merits of possum breeding, as well as the hard-won reconciliations with self, others, and home that can only be garnered in good time. The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth shows us the promising beginnings of a master storyteller honing his craft and contributing from the start to the fine traditions of southern fiction and lore. This Southern Revivals edition includes a new introduction from the author and a contextualizing preface from series editor Robert H. Brinkmeyer, director of the University of South Carolina Institute for Southern Studies"-- "Featuring fictional stories by Ron Rash with a new introduction by the author"--