Description:
Down Along the Piney is a touching collection of short stories that provides ironic and poignantly honest perspectives of rural American communities across the country.
Brief description:
John Mort's first novel, Soldier in Paradise, won the W. Y. Boyd Award for best military fiction. He has published seven other books, including the story collections Tanks, The Walnut King, and Dont Mean Nothin: Vietnam War Stories. John Mort served in Vietnam with the First Cavalry and afterward attended the University of Iowa, receiving MFA and MLS degrees. He is a member of the Western Writers of America and in 2013 won a Spur Award for his short story, "The Hog Whisperer," included in Down Along the Piney published by the University of Notre Dame Press. He lives in southern Missouri where he raises vegetables and fruit.
Review Quotes:
"John Mort's Down Along the Piney captures an enormous range of characters in its collection of stories: misfits, idealists, war-scarred veterans, dream-drenched teenagers, holy fools, garden-variety fools, and ordinary people simply trying to get through the day. The stories take place anywhere from Missouri to Mexico, but the Ozarks are woven into all of them. Expatriates dream of returning, natives imagine fleeing, travelers find themselves permanently changed. This is not the Ozarks of cornpone mythology or gothic crime fiction, but a truer and more haunted place, one that could only have been depicted by someone with deep sympathies and an exacting eye. These stories pin you down and do not let up." --Steve Wiegenstein, author of Slant of Light: A Novel of Utopian Dreams and Civil War