Allegheny Front
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
“Beautiful and finely crafted . . . We come to see how, in the Appalachia of both past and present, the inevitability of change may be the only constant” (Oxford American).
A Publishers Weekly “Best Book of Summer 2016”
The Millions and The Masters Review “Most Anticipated Book of 2016”
O, The Oprah Magazine “Ten Titles to Pick Up Now”
Set in the author’s homeland of West Virginia, this panoramic collection of stories traces the people and animals who live in precarious balance in the mountains of Appalachia over a span of two hundred years, in a disappearing rural world. With omniscient narration, rich detail, and lyrical prose, Matthew Neill Null brings his landscape and characters vividly to life.
“This remarkable story collection . . . is a clear-eyed look at an area that has been torn apart for more than a century. . . . Null never yields to nihilism, but captures the rich and complex, if imperfect, lives of the dispossessed.” —The New York Times Book Review
“The nine stories in the collection are masterpieces of brutality and beauty . . . This is the work of a master storyteller.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“West Virginia author Matthew Neill Null brings the richness of his mountain heritage to each page. . . . He bypasses the tired clichés and timeworn assumptions of Appalachian life. He skips straight to the essence of the mountains and valleys.” —Charleston Gazette-Mail
“Tender and elegant. . . . Within that setting of crags, foreboding forests, and onrushing creeks, Null finds poetry and moments that can sometimes bear something like grace. . . . Null is a natural writer with much to say.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The deceptively powerful stories in Null's first collection, after his debut novel, Honey from the Lion, create a map not only of the geography of rural West Virginia but also of its people. These are characters inhabiting places largely ignored by the outside world. In "Mates," a man kills an endangered bald eagle on his land, believing himself to be above the law, and is then stalked and tormented by the eagle's mate. In "Gauley Season," a group of ex-miners turn to operating rafting companies after their mining jobs disappear, but the promising new industry quickly leads to tragedy. The rugged lives of a group of log drivers in the late 1800s are chronicled in "The Slow Lean of Time." In the astonishing "Telemetry," a young scientist's camp on Back Allegheny Mountain is visited by a local man and his daughter, their presence forcing the scientist to confront her relationship to her own origins, which becomes a recurring theme in the collection. Violence is inevitable in these stories guns are almost always present, and they aren't just decoration but there is plenty of beauty, too. Landscape is an essential element, as well as the constant presence of wild animals, but Null focuses on the ways that a setting can shape how we identify with the world. The scope of the collection contains voices from multiple generations, and the result is a kaleidoscopic portrait of a distinctive region of North America, as well as an exercise in finding the universal in the particular.
