Stories

[jamiereadthis]

Anthologies, by their nature, rarely hit the five-star mark. You have the stellar entries, but you have the mediocre ones too; the brilliant choices and then the ones that seem appointed by committee or included out of obligation, or because they seem enough like all the rest. Any kind of collection like that, it’s exciting for the potential, and frustrating for the inconsistencies, but that’s the game. You know going in it’s a grab-bag.

Well. If there’s a way to out-do an anthology, Donald Hays has outdone himself here. He lays out the criteria in the introduction, and sticks by it: every story must have place. That place must be particular and various. Barry Hannah’s Mississippi is not Lewis Nordan’s, or William Faulkner’s, and so forth. And he finds fault with those who disagree, who think it’s all homogenous. “Well,” he says, “you and I know they’re wrong. Besides, they have their own anthologies, in which, appropriately, one story is much like the next. None of that here.”

Indeed: none of that here. There’s not a weak link in the batch, nothing that’s not— in its own way— tremendous. I couldn’t say it any better than Cassill praises in the description above. If you’re looking for a primer on Southern lit, here’s your primer on Southern lit.