Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail: Stories

Bobbie Ann Mason is "one of those rare writers who, by concentrating their attention on a few square miles of native turf, are able to open up new and surprisingly wide worlds for the delighted reader", said The New York Review of Books about the classic Shiloh and Other Stories. Now, almost twenty years later, Mason's Kentuckians have changed, along with America. People whose families have been rooted in one small town for generations are suddenly going places -- Alaska, California, Atlanta, Saudi Arabia -- fired by imagination, new money, and compelling TV and movie images. In Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail we meet unforgettable characters who venture wildly out into the wide world but still feel drawn back to the place that seems most authentic: home. In these remarkable stories, Mason captures the essence of contemporary America in a time of transition and change, when lives open up, or fail to. And in her distinctive and mesmerizing voice, she offers deep wisdom about human nature, in fiction that is always acute, beautifully written, true to life, yet always surprising.