Bucket of Hooves and Other Old Worn Out Stories

With Bucket of Hooves, a series of biographical recollections, Presbyterian pastor Jeffrey E. Bryan drives a couple exits past Southern Gothic and takes a hard left into the realm of Southern Apocalyptic. Not apocalyptic in the esoteric, flying off to the sweet by and by, “Be good or you won’t get raptured” sense. Just the opposite. These stories are apocalyptic in what they reveal: humor amidst heartbreak, truth amidst pretense, God amidst all the empty exercises, religious or otherwise, that we use to keep reality at bay. Throughout this collection, Bryan takes readers on a guided tour through his Christ-haunted adolescence in small-town Georgia. As Bryan shares his thoughts on everything from God to sex to basketball, readers will encounter a cloud of witnesses both strange and familiar, a family and community bound together by tradition, terror, and love. There is whiskey. There is death. There is an emu hellbent on destruction and a Civil War ghost who lives in the basement. And there is grace, revealed in the profane but holy lives of the characters who populate these pages.


A member of the Appalachian Diaspora, Jeffrey E. Bryan is a Philadelphia-based author, pastor, and family man who stands in a long tradition of Southern story-telling. He has been an ordained Presbyterian minister since 2004, is pastor of a Presbyterian church in Delaware County, PA, and holds a Master of Divinity degree from Princeton Theological Seminary. He loves to spend time with his wife and two children.