THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 3, 1995 TAG: 9508310620
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY GEORGE HEBERT
LENGTH: Medium: 62 lines
NEW STORIES FROM THE SOUTH
The Year's Best, 1995
EDITED BY SHANNON RAVENEL
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. 259 pp. $10.95 paper.
If short stories are graded by their emotional wallop - and it's hard to think of a better way - then high marks should go to all of the 17 contributions in the latest package of New Stories from the South.
This 10th annual anthology in a series launched and edited by Shannon Ravenel is a rich cream-off of short fiction from various literary journals, mostly Southern, and a couple of national magazines. But Southernness of publication, authorship or setting
doesn't really have much to do with whether these pieces succeed or not - finding some kind of literary magic in various regional origins is a contrived thing, anyhow, by my lights. Good stories are good stories. And these are.
One standout is Susan Perabo's ``Gravity,'' a tangle of tension that knocks your socks off with this opening sentence: ``It rained the morning of the day we killed Dennis Zeller'' Other contributions range from an inventive yarn by Robert Olen Butler, with the marvelous come-on title, ``Boy Born With Tattoo of Elvis,'' to a graphically medical story, ``Everything Quiet Like Church,'' by Dale Ray Phillips, about a midwife-managed birth, one of the crisis points being a beery game of horseshoes played by the unnerved father and the midwife's sister.
Then there is a zinger by Tim Goutreaux (``The Bug Man''), a moving little drama about an exterminator's match-making attempt in the strata of affluent homeowners where he plies his trade.
Just as absorbing is the detailed first-person account - also, like Perabo's story, titled ``Gravity'' - of a little girl's hospital experience and her struggle to rejoin the world after badly smashing some lower vertebrae and other body parts in a 40-foot fall from a tree house. This one is by Jesse Lee Kercheval.
The other big talents chosen for the book by Ravenel, Algonquin's editorial director, are James Lee Burke, Scott Gould, Caroline A. Langston, Ken Craven - the nugget within his ``Paying Attention,'' however, is hard to dig out from its clumps of non-standard English - Lynn Marie, Elizabeth Spencer, MMM Hayes, Ellen Gilchrist, Wendy Brenner - her ``I Am the Bear'' poses the challenge that a human in a bear suit and a human without can make a vibrant but fleeting emotional connection - R. Sebastian Bennett, Hillary Hebert and Barry Hannah.
Each story also has an appendage - a few lines about its author and then a few more lines in which the author tells something about the whys and wherefores of his or her story. A bit much? Like spoiling a witty observation or the mood of a poem with an explanation?
Not at all. These additions are jewels. Bonuses on top of all the fine reading. MEMO: George Hebert is a former editor of The Ledger-Star. by CNB