In seven stories set in the rural South and West, Cecil Dawkins displays her remarkable talent for getting beneath the surface of ordinary lives and revealing their foibles and idiosyncrasies. An old deaf woman is kidnapped by a stranger she takes to be the devil; an atom bomb is tested in the Arizona desert; a man shoots a housebreaker dead; a son comes home for a funeral; a child disappears; a boy has his faith destroyed; a parched, money-grubbing man meets a woman no less hard. From these occasions Dawkins distills strong, rich stories.

Dawkins writes about people not sharply...

Anyone who still believes women are frail, powerless, and incapable of dealing with machinery should read the story of Frances Nunnery, a determined, ingenious entrepreneur whose career and personality defy every stereotype about women. We first meet her as a self-sufficient little girl working on a Virginia tobacco farm, a youngster who, when she got a "lickin," never cried but "stood there as a matter of pride" and took her medicine. At thirteen she went to work at the Heinz plant in Pittsburgh, and at twenty-one she was shipped off to Colorado to be married to a man she didn't know. In...