"Why I Lie"tells the painful and hilarious story of a down home Arkansas boy's efforts to make good. Jack Smith, the protagonist of this story cycle, is an unwilling ne'er-do-well, from "people who ate roadkill, whose hearts got broken early on and stayed that way," for whom "being poor was a way of thinking, a mindset you couldn't outrun with a suitcase full of money." The ten stories in this powerful collection trace Jack's ongoing attempts to outrun the violence and tragedy of his past and create a viable life despite a native state that often traps its rural poor. The road to Jack's...

""The Death of Bonnie and Clyde" and Other Stories" follows the trail of its wayward characters down the Delta back roads, crossing paths with Hernando DeSoto--hands bloodied by the indian slaughters--hitchhikers and thieves, UFO's, concrete finishers, naked fishermen, a lusty cheer squad caught and confessing in the midst of a killer tornado, and trash telescope salesmen on the day after Christmas-all saintly guardians of the human heart. From the Florida Coast up through the Carolinas and over to Arkansas' Ozarks, Bonnie and Clyde blazes a trail of love and deceit, hard liquor and the...

Josephine Stepwell Harvell is certainly not lucky in love; from Buddy Washer, the Arizona mistake, who got her pregnant and then got arrested trying to smuggle weed in the belly of a Santa Claus suit, to O.W., a truck driving brawler who pawns everything including her sewing machine to cover bets, Josephine knows that love isnt easy. Go Loves muddy relationships finally twist together amidst the weirdness of a southern funeral in Lonoke, Arkansas, a place where housewives string cottonmouth water moccasins from tree limbs to tease out rain, or to make a man impotent for cheating. Anything at...

The House across from the Deaf School, Michael Gills third collection of short fiction, continues the life and times of Joey Harvell, whose stepfather, in Last Words on Lonoke, gives him a .30-06, tells him not to aim at anything he doesn t want to kill, and that s pretty much it for his] gun safety lessons. Later, in What The Newly Dead Don t Know But Learn, his uncle swims Joey and a group of fake cowboys across a creek on Camp Robinson, only a fisherman s trotline is stretched across the S-curve, and the result, like the book as a whole, is a hard fight there s no recovering from....