New Stories from the South 1998: The Year's Best

"The literature of the South is full of people running around admitting or denying their whippedness." Whether you buy his explanation or not, Padgett Powell is here in full force to explain Southern literature. And just as his preface will make you rethink what that term means, so will the nineteen stories forming the collection this year. Culled from journals and magazines across the country, Shannoln Ravenel's choices illustrate the ongoing evolution of literature from and about the South. Whether it's a surreal mediation by a man on night watch in contact with everything from space aliens to a charming Southern bellle, or how life looks to two stock boys in a grocery store, or the stories hidden within captions in a book of daguerreotypes, this newest collection is proof positive that the literature of the South refuses to be pigeonholed.