Jason Sandford
Jason Sandford is a reporter, writer, blogger and photographer interested in all things Asheville.
The reviews are rolling in of Ron Rash’s latest, a collection of short stories titled Burning Bright. Rash will be reading from his new book, which is a collection of short stories, at Malaprop’s on March 19.
This is from the Miami Herald. I can’t wait to read the book.
The stories of Burning Bright aren’t all set in the present. They jump around in time like a catfish on the line, from the Depression-era Hard Times, in which a spark of compassion ignites in a farmer once eggs disappear from his henhouse. The collection’s finale, Lincolnites, in which the wife of a Union sympathizer encounters a hostile Confederate soldier, is set in the waning days of the war.
Yet the contemporary stories aren’t much different in atmosphere and mood. The hardscrabble mentality and tone remain, reflecting a down-but-not-out determination. You do what you must. You’re happy when you can be and unhappy otherwise. Life is that simple.
The narrator of Waiting for the End of the World — a divorced, ex-high-school English teacher who lives in a trailer and plays in a bar band to keep “the repo man away from my truck” — notes the way his neighbors come alive when he begins to play Free Bird. Their brief moments of joy make him believe that “Van Zant somehow found a conduit into the collective unconscious of his race. . . . Maybe it’s just the music’s slow surging build. Or maybe something more — a yearning for the kind of freedom Van Zant’s lyrics deal with, a recognition of the human need to lay their burdens down. And maybe, for a few moments, being connected to the music and lyrics enough to actually feel unshackled, free and in flight.”
Rash, too, has found a conduit. He has written a memorable, if often brutal, elegy for a vanishing way of life.
Connie Ogle is The Miami Herald’s book editor.
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