The Current That Carries
Stories
Title Details
Pages: 176
Trim size: 5.500in x 8.500in
Formats
Paperback
Pub Date: 10/15/2018
ISBN: 9-780-8203-5472-9
List Price: $20.95
Hardcover
Pub Date: 09/15/2016
ISBN: 9-780-8203-4987-9
List Price: $26.95
Web PDF
Pub Date: 09/15/2016
ISBN: 9-780-8203-4988-6
List Price: $26.95
The Current That Carries
Stories
Stories about grit, gratitude, and grace in Appalachian West Virginia
Skip to
- Description
- Reviews
This collection bristles and hums with the rugged resilience one encounters in southern and Appalachian fiction where ghosts of loved ones and livestock alike haunt an underworld of lonely trails. Set in West Virginia, the stories take up residence with rural characters who defend their mailboxes against teenagers, bathe and feed their bedridden elders, and circle the inflated orbs of love and desire in high school gymnasiums. Whole lifetimes flare in an instant as characters scramble to sift through the past’s wreckage to find some small miracle in the present.
If there is nostalgia, it’s for a South without billboards, talk shows, and children with iPods dangling from their ears. It’s for a South where you can go pick a ripe tomato to slice for the mayonnaise on your sandwich because you found time to plant a garden. And if there’s grace, it is in the careful wading through a shifting current to reach possibilities snagged at the bottom of a trotline.
In lean, muscular prose, Lisa Graley pays homage to the daily chores that makeup a lifetime. With delicate precision, she renders the boundaries between fear and courage, indifference and compassion as thin as the blade of a shovel.
—Kirkus Reviews
—Robert Olen Butler, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
—Ron Carlson, author of Return to Oakpine
—Karin Lin-Greenberg, author of Faulty Predictions