Poachers
In ten stunning and bleak tales set in the woodlands, swamps, and chemical plants along the Alabama River, Tom Franklin stakes his claim as a fresh, original Southern voice. His lyric, deceptively simple prose conjures a world where the default setting is violence, a world of hunting and fishing, gambling and losing, drinking and poaching--a world most of us have never seen. In the chilling title novella (selected for the anthologies New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, 1999 and Best Mystery Stories of the Century), three wild boys confront a mythic game warden as mysterious and deadly as the river they haunt. And, as a weathered, hand-painted sign reads: "Jesus is not coming;" This terrain isn't pretty, isn't for the weak of heart, but in these desperate, lost people, Franklin somehow finds the moments of grace that make them what they so abundantly are: human.
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Tom Franklin is the New York Times bestselling author of Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Crime Writers' Association's Gold Dagger Award. His previous works include Poachers, Hell at the Breech, and Smonk. He teaches in the University of Mississippi's MFA program.
-- San Francisco Chronicle
"I like Tom Franklin's stories the same way I like Lucinda Williams' music, and for the same reason: they're not updating an old song. They're set in the south, sure. But they're a new song for the south. They possess an inherent sweetness even when they're rough 'n tough. And when they're funny, it's not at the world's expense. They're poignant, and I suppose their poignance comes from longing; yet not for some mossy past--because they are contemporary stories--but for the present, as it spirits away from in front of us just at the moment we notice it's arrived. These stories surprised me. They give valuable and unexpected depth to what I thought fiction could do."-- Richard Ford"Franklin writes as if his hands and mind are on fire. "Poachers plumbs raw and startling places. His stories are burning, waiting for you."-- Rick Bass"[A] startling debut collection...darker than anything delivered since the work of James Dickey."-- "San Francisco Chronicle
