Description
As with his novels, many of Robert Morgan’s short stories let characters, often women, tell their own stories. Morgan’s earliest publications were short stories, and over six decades he has continued to produce short fiction, along with novels, poetry, essays, and biographies. He has said the short narrative is the most challenging genre, requiring the concision and precision of a poem with the drama and implied character insights of longer fiction. These stories reflect the distinctive features of his poetry, vivid, lyrical, evoking a particular place.
Morgan has found the culture and land of the southern Appalachians especially suited to expression in poetry and short fiction, the beauty of the ridges and valleys, the unique history, the laconic speech of the people, intense bonds of family and community, the storytelling gifts, and long memories. Gathered from five previous volumes of short fiction, Uplands proves greater in impact than the sum of its individual pieces.
320-page hard back.
“Robert Morgan’s lyric mountain language is equal to the epic sweep of history, to the grandeur of the land itself.”
—Lee Smith, author of Fair and Tender Ladies
“His characters live not just in Appalachia but where most of us do: in a world where lives converge, social inequities intrude, dignity comes with a struggle, nature abides, memory persists, and meaning comes, if at all, when least expected. By putting down in prose the essential experiences of a handful of characters, Mr. Morgan has delivered something extraordinarily rare.”
—The Atlanta Journal and Constitution
[Speaking of Gap Creek] “The work of a master …” Robert Morgan “has created one of the most admirable heroines in modern literature. I feel I’ll remember her always. Here is strength and grace and immeasurable courage: a triumph.”
—Fred Chappell
“At their finest, his stripped-down and almost primitive sentences burn with the raw, lonesome pathos of Hank Williams’s best songs.”
—New York Times Book Review
Morgan writes “with the authority usually associated with the great novelists of the last century.”
—The Boston Book Review
“Robert Morgan’s mastery of storytelling is magic.”
—Fred Busch, author of Harry and Catherine
HARDBACK VERSION (320 PAGES)
Robert Morgan
