Here are startling and compelling stories of small-town life in the tradition of Sherwood Anderson's ""Winesburg, Ohio"". The stories in ""A Near-Perfect Gift"" center around often hardscrabble small-town life in one rural community. Like any other place, it's a community, where both the banal and the improbable coalesce, a place with its share of common tragedies and uncommon madmen, some of whom howl at the moon, and others who turn out to be heroes. There are the two old ladies down the street who might be witches and must be exorcised, or the man who plucks chickens for a living. It's the sort of place where small questions - often the kind that children ask, questions that arise from a child's imagined understanding of how the adult world works - assume enormous proportions: was that a snake beneath the woodpile? Could a pregnant bat climb out of a hole in the ground? The answers never cease to surprise.
- ISBN10 6612422645
- ISBN13 9786612422645
- Publish Date 18 March 2009 (first published 30 September 2005)
- Publish Status Active
- Out of Print 15 August 2012
- Publish Country US
- Imprint University of Michigan Press
- Format eBook
- Pages 193
- Language English