Vendor
	Fritz Agency Christian Dittus
Original language
English
Categories
Fiction & Related items

POACHERS

Tom Franklin

In ten stunning and bleak tales set in the woodlands, swamps, and chemical plants along the Alabama River, Tom Franklin stakes his claim as a fresh, original Southern voice. His lyric, deceptively simple prose conjures a world where the default setting is violence, a world of hunting and fishing, gambling and losing, drinking and poachinga world most of us have never seen. In the chilling title novella (selected for the anthologies New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, 1999 and Best Mystery Stories of the Century), three wild boys confront a mythic game warden as mysterious and deadly as the river they haunt. And, as a weathered, hand-painted sign reads: "Jesus is not coming;" This terrain isn't pretty, isn't for the weak of heart, but in these desperate, lost people, Franklin somehow finds the moments of grace that make them what they so abundantly are: human.

Tom Franklin is the New York Times bestselling author of Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Crime Writers' Association's Gold Dagger Award. His previous works include Poachers, Hell at the Breech, and Smonk. He teaches in the University of Mississippi's MFA program.

WILDERER
Deutsch von Nikolaus Stingl
[TB Pulpmaster 12/2020]

Available products
Book Published 1999-05-01 by William Morrow

Comments

The title story concerns a doomed family of three brotherssons of a father who committed suicidewho make their living hunting illegal game and kill a warden when he confronts them over it. Dark and evocative, its the most atmospheric and best-developed piece here. Refreshingly gritty and unpretentious: stories that manage to open the door on whatfor most readersremains a previously unknown world.

I like Tom Franklin's stories the same way I like Lucinda Williams' music, and for the same reason: they're not updating an old song. They're set in the south, sure. But they're a new song for the south. They possess an inherent sweetness even when they're rough 'n tough. And when they're funny, it's not at the world's expense. They're poignant, and I suppose their poignance comes from longing; yet not for some mossy past--because they are contemporary stories--but for the present, as it spirits away from in front of us just at the moment we notice it's arrived. These stories surprised me. They give valuable and unexpected depth to what I thought fiction could do. -- Richard Ford

While he may occasionally wax sentimental about life in the impoverished South, Franklin's style is often as laconic and simply spoken as his characters' dialogue, sometimes close to Hemingway, but more often akin to Denis Johnson or Raymond Carver in its resonant ordinariness. Although some readers may balk at the virtual absence of women from these intensely masculine yarns, those who persist will be persuaded by their gruff grace.