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Readers who savor short stories will be pleased to know that two established writers, Bobbie Ann Mason and Thomas McGuane, have collections out this summer.
*McGuane's Gallatin Canyon stories twist and turn through all kinds of circumstances and places.
The stories range in setting: Montana, a Massachusetts mill town, west, east, forest, ocean. He writes about all kinds of people: an elderly man who heads back home (Aliens), a bum who searches for redemption (The Refugee), a Yalie who seeks help from a former schoolmate (Old Friends).
McGuane lives on 2,000-acre working ranch in Montana. He has published 14 books, including 1971's The Bushwacked Piano, 1973's Ninety-Two in the Shade (which was nominated for a National Book Award) and 2002's The Cadence of Grass.
Five stories in Gallatin Canyon were published in The New Yorker; the other five are new.
Some moments in these tales are simply breathtaking.
In Ice, a teenager tests his courage in a dangerous way. He skates on Lake Erie into the dark trying to show (who? himself? God? a superior-acting kid at school?) that he is, after all, truly brave.
*Mason so loves the people she is writing about in Nancy Culpepper that readers enter into their hearts, too.
This collection of six short stories and one novella centers on the Kentucky-born Nancy Culpepper and her life as a granddaughter, daughter, wife, mother and middle-age woman.
When Mason arrived on the scene with Shiloh and Other Stories in 1982, she caused quite the stir. Novelist Anne Tyler urged readers to buy -- not borrow or check out from a library -- this short-story collection as a "way of casting your vote for real literature."
Readers may very well find themselves having the same reaction to Nancy Culpepper.
Only two pieces are new -- The Heirs and The Prelude. The collection includes the previously published novella Spence + Lila, about Nancy's parents.
You never know what each story will bring. Nothing is predictable. Everything is subtle.
Culpepper's life comes full circle in this book. In the final story, she faces growing older and the prospect of becoming a grandmother. It's called (of course!) The Prelude.
Gallatin Canyon
By Thomas McGuane
Knopf, 219 pp., $24
Nancy Culpepper
By Bobbie Ann Mason
Random House, 224 pp., $22.95
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