Town Smokes by Pinckney Benedict

Pinckney Benedict's Town Smokes is a collection of his short stories published in 1987, when he was only 23 years old. Pretty impressive to have a collection out at that age, and with praise on the back cover from both Eudora Welty and Joyce Carol Oates. Narrating in first person dialect is a difficult task, not recommended for amateurs, but Benedict pulls off this point-of-view/voice technique effortlessly. 

National Short Story Month

May is National Short Story month. I didn't realize this until today, but fortunately I happened to bring home two short story collections from the library yesterday. My unwitting salute to NSS month began last night, when I read one story each from the following books.

A friend recently told me how much he has enjoyed reading Yoko Ogawa's The Housekeeper and the Professor. In reading about Ms. Ogawa, I was impressed that she has won "every major Japanese literary award." The Diving Pool is a collection of three novellas. The first story, also entitled The Diving Pool, is a coming of age tale narrated by an unnamed adolescent girl, as she experiences the curiosity, angst, and ultimate devastation of a youthful crush.

Press 53 just announced the release of Pinckney Benedict's latest collection of short stories, Miracle Boy and Other Stories. Having never read anything by Benedict either, I checked out Town Smokes, his first short story collection published in 1986 when he was 23. Benedict sets his stories in the bleak, often brutally hard-scrabble rural south. Sutton Pie Safe is the first selection in the book, and contains iconic southern-lit components: a snake, a gun, a beautiful woman, an angry father and his son.