Description: Twenty-seven writers contribute poetry, essays, short stories, and book excerpts that focus on the fabled mountain town, offering readers a broad and varied picture of life in Asheville, past and present, as well as a sense of the town's literary breadth.
Review Quotes:
27 Views of Asheville presents a brightly colored, kaleidoscopic vision of a city lately come to prominence for its metropolitan ambience and cultural background. Here is a place full of variety and surprise, yet over it hangs an atmosphere of the old-time hometown. It is as if the spirit of Thomas Wolfe invested each space and object with a mist of nostalgia. Asheville is a soulful town, "filled with heartache remembering history," as one writer puts it. Yet everywhere is an easy gaiety. So it is absolutely untrue that those who call Asheville "the Paris fo the South" are holding a grudge against Paris. They know how it is. These days, Paris should be so lucky. --Fred Chappell
It is not mandatory that a reader be familiar with (let alone a lover of) the works of the late novelist Thomas Wolfe in order to appreciate the new anthology, 27 Views of Asheville: A Southern Mountain Town in Prose & Poetry. And it s not required that one be a current, former, or sometime resident of this storied and much-loved North Carolina hamlet. Surely a discerning, open-minded reader who has perhaps never even been to Asheville, or maybe never even heard of Asheville, will still appreciate the colorful panorama sketched by the twenty-seven writers whose work graces these pages. There is so much to recommend this spirited, diverse, and muscular collection of personal essays, narrative nonfiction, memoir shorts, prose poems, narrative poetry, and short stories, and a true reader will definitely find favorites among the panoply of offerings. --FOREWORD Reviews, May 2012