The Blue Valley - by Robert Morgan (Paperback)

About the Book

This debut collection of short stories charts a course through the North Carolina mountains, revealing the strong bonds of Southern families.

Book Synopsis

From Civil War prison camps to contemporary trailer parks, these thirteen memorable tales of life in the Southern Appalachians come alive with an array of intriguing characters -- male and female, young and elderly, learned and unlearned. The separate passions and dreams of these individuals mirror the larger cultural and historical dramas of American life, revealing the strengthening and loosening of the strong bonds of families over generations.

From the Back Cover

THE REMARKABLE DEBUT SHORT-STORY COLLECTION FROM THE HIGHLY ESTEEMED POET AND BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF GAP CREEK

From Civil War prison camps to contemporary trailer parks, these thirteen memorable tales of life in the Southern Appalachians come alive with an array of intriguing characters -- male and female, young and elderly, learned and unlearned. The separate passions and dreams of these individuals mirror the larger cultural and historical dramas of American life, revealing the strengthening and loosening of the strong bonds of families over generations.

Review Quotes

The New York Times This beautifully crafted collection [is] a procession of tales rich with native detail and character, told in language as plain and deep as the hills, the whole weighted with an awareness of death that looms over the struggle for a meaningful life.

Fred Chappell The Raleigh News and Observer As clean and unadorned as Shaker furniture...and often quite as beautiful...A profound and genuine book.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution The Blue Valleys...brims with excellence...Mr. Morgan has delivered something extraordinarily rare: a beautiful and humble work that does justice to the spirits that were always there, somewhere between those rising mists, in the mountains north of Atlanta.

About the Author

An accomplished novelist and poet, Robert Morgan has won the James B. Hanes Poetry Prize, the North Carolina Award in Literature, and the Jacaranda Review Fiction Prize. His short stories have appeared in Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and New Stories from the South, and his novel The Truest Pleasure was a finalist for the Southern Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. He is a professor of English at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.