Miracle Boy is a beautiful collection -- immaculately crafted, moving, surprising and sustaining. A book full of dreams of wonder and horror, tenderness, brutality and confusion -- each shot through with a shattered humanity. A remarkable achievement and a testament to the power of the short story form. -- AL Kennedy
Pinckney Benedict grew up on his family’s dairy farm in the mountains of southern West Virginia. He has published two collections of short fiction and a novel. His stories have appeared in Esquire, Zoetrope: All-Story, the O. Henry Award series, the New Stories from the South series, the Pushcart Prize series, The Oxford Book of American Short Stories, and The Ecco Anthology of Contemporary American Short Fiction.
Benedict evokes the world of hard-bitten Southern men who live in
shabby weatherbeaten houses or rickety trailers, who work in tire
factories or slaughterhouses, who are slow to speak but quick to
explode in anger, and whose women are tangential figures.
*Publishers Weekly*
What Beattie did for urbanites, Cheever and Updike for
suburbanites, a younger generation Omstead, Abbott, Cullen, and now
Benedict is doing for the rural population. Only 22 and recipient
of the 1986 Nelson Algren Award, Benedict has published stories in
the Chicago Tribune and Ontario Review. His world is regional,
tough, raw, male; these nine stories deal with the mountain men,
sheep farmers, and hog raisers of rural West Virginia.
*Library Journal*
An often heart-stopping literary performance.
*The New York Times*
Benedict's first collection of stories since his auspicious if
uneven debut (Town Smokes, 1987) is a far more accomplished work,
establishing him among the best young southern writers – full of
passion and mature enough to keep it under control. Benedict
searches out the moral dimension in the hardscrabble lives of
rednecks and country people, and transcends the folksy bromides
they espouse. He discerns the confusion and ambiguities in their
seemingly uncomplicated lives.
*Kirkus Reviews*
In this taut, muscular thriller set in contemporary rural West
Virginia, short-story writer Benedict (The Wrecking Yard) hurtles
the reader toward a chillingly apocalyptic climax replete with
high-tech weaponry and old-fashioned treachery. Peopled with an
assortment of New South grotesques, the story centers on Goody, a
young bare-fisted fighter new to the neighborhood, and Tannhauser,
a deranged, 12-fingered backwoods drug lord with a penchant for
sadism.
*Publishers Weekly*
In this first novel, Benedict continues his exploration of rural
West Virginia life begun in his two short story collections, The
Wrecking Yard and Town Smokes. As in the short stories, the writing
here is strong and vivid. The wide cast of characters includes
Goody (a boxer), Dwight (a tourist guide), drug enforcement agents,
marijuana growers, gunrunners, illegal immigrants, and a variety of
lost and corrupt souls. They live and die in an atmosphere of
bleakness and despair, with violence and brutality as constant
companions.
*Library Journal*
Benedict, who lives in West Virginia, is the author of two highly
regarded short story collections, Town Smokes and The Wrecking
Yard. In this, his first novel, individual chapters have the
compression of short stories, but he fails to maintain a
novel-length narrative flow, and none of his characters sustain
interest for the book's 300-plus pages. Still, his language is
vivid and assured, his dialogue is skillfully written and
convincing, and he creates an atmosphere of unsettling
strangeness.
*Booklist*
The first novel by storywriter Benedict (Town Smokes, 1987; The
Wrecking Yard, 1992) barely resembles his measured and lyrical
short fiction. Benedict owes more here to action movies than to any
literary source: the levels of violence and the plot
improbabilities have the same nihilistic drive of a Peckinpah film.
In Benedict's West Virginia, the smell of death pervades the air,
and wild dogs and boars rule the uninhabited forest. Government
land, long abandoned, now serves the local drug lords, who import
South American laborers to harvest their best cash crop: marijuana.
Into this corrupt mountain community stumbles Goody, a good but
troubled bare-fisted boxer who once killed a man in a dirty
match.
*Kirkus Reviews*
 |
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
