Out of the Mountains
Appalachian Stories
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- USD 26.99
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- USD 26.99
Descripción editorial
Meredith Sue Willis’s Out of the Mountains is a collection of thirteen short stories set in contemporary Appalachia. Firmly grounded in place, the stories voyage out into the conflicting cultural identities that native Appalachians experience as they balance mainstream and mountain identities.
Willis’s stories explore the complex negotiations between longtime natives of the region and its newcomers and the rifts that develop within families over current issues such as mountaintop removal and homophobia. Always, however, the situations depicted in these stories are explored in the service of a deeper understanding of the people involved, and of the place. This is not the mythic version of Appalachia, but the Appalachia of the twenty-first century.
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Willis (A Space Apart) returns to her West Virginia roots with a dozen vivid stories set among the "restless" salt of the earth. In the first story, "Triangulation," the narrator ponders the effects of history and chance on her present life by examining three individuals from 1917 who were bonded by cataclysmic events: Austrian painter Gustav Klimt, anarchist Emma Goldman, and the narrator's grandmother, a teenager at the time living in West Virginia. In subsequent stories Willis gives great texture to the lives of north-central Appalachian folk, like Merlee Savage who, in "Pie Knob," finally leaves her ne'er-do-well husband and gets a job helping a well-off Jewish woman through chemotherapy. In the autobiographical tale, "Elvissa and the Rabbi," Willis pursues the single-minded trek of a native daughter determined to get to New York City at any cost. These crisp stories burn with the tender-heartedness Willis obviously has for her characters.
