Kirjahaku

DON'T LET THE TITLE of this book fool you, this collection of short stories by Randall Ivey is Southern through and through. Set in the upcountry of South Carolina in the fictitious County of Compton, Ivey's stories introduce us to a cast of memorable characters. From the bookish and idealistic Jane Poage who falls for a handsome New England thespian, to the eleven-year-old minister and faith-healer Reverend Benny Troy Hoyt, to the peculiar, yet misunderstood Yankee high school chorus teacher, Mrs. Stratton, Ivey's stories are certain to shock, entertain, and perhaps even move one to tears. If you have ever "visited" William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, or "passed through" James Kibler's Clay Bank County, you will most certainly want to add Ivey's Compton County to your literary travel itinerary. EDITORIAL REVIEWS: "Randall Ivey manages, quite implausibly, to marry the grace, delicacy, and devotion to manners of Henry James with the dark-hued, confessional Americana of Sherwood Anderson.... With this collection, Ivey takes his place as a significant voice in the great tradition of Southern narrative." -Jim Clark "Don't be fooled. There is more to these comic stories than comedy. Beneath the laughter the tear of sympathy is always present." -James Everett Kibler COMMENTS ON PREVIOUS SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS BY RANDALL IVEY: "Set in the contemporary American South, these stories resound with universal themes and touch the heart with their humor and insight." "Each story is marked by the writer's versatility and scored by a chorus of distinct voices, young and old, black and white, rich and poor, urbane and primitive." "classic comic Southern storytelling"

RANDALL IVEY'S LATEST COLLECTION OF STORIES takes his readers back to the apocryphal Compton County, South Carolina, a Deep South haven a-swarm with a myriad of characters from different walks of life, with different points of view, and who sing with their own individual voices.There's Mrs. Jenny deGraffenreid, whose Methodist goodness of heart leads her to commit a most unfortunate act of charity; Simona Diggs, who attends funerals so that she may squirrel away the food from the bereaved until she is stopped by pranksters; Debbie Lynn Fulton, whose romantic woes rise to such a pitch she winds up ruining her uncle's funeral; Rusty Flowers, whose love of glitter puts him in backwoods peril; Otto Runnels, who suffers bullying at the hands of older boys before finally striking back; and Jessie McMillan, who, upon discovering her husband's infidelity, carries out her retribution in a most public way.These and other characters await readers in tales comic, pathetic, and even macabre as only a master storyteller from the South can tell them.