A brilliant debut collection of stories set in the American Deep South, by a distinctive and award-winning new voice.
Poachers reads as if Raymond Carver were still alive and living in the profoundly Deep South. Or imagine a world created by Cormac McCarthy and plunk it down in the woods of southern Alabama, where emotions run as raw as moonshine.
In ten spare, muscular stories, Tom Franklin evokes a world of forests and swamps, hunting and fishing, and fills it with poachers, drunks and poor white trash. He creates haunting tales about people who react, often violently, against a dying world whose gravity they can’t escape, people like the three half-wild brothers in the award-winning title story, who treat the swamp as their kingdom and hunt down anything that crosses their path – until they themselves become the prey.
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
ISBN: 9780006552260
Number of pages: 208
Weight: 149 g
Dimensions: 198 x 129 x 14 mm
‘It’s as if the author kidnapped Raymond Carver’s characters and set them loose in the Deep South.’New York Times Book Review ‘I am amazed by [Franklin’s] power. I’m reminded, by the evocative strength of the prose and the relentlessness of the imagination, of Faulkner. Franklin is a vivid portraitist of these harsh human types, and his authority in depicting the natural world “along this stretch of the Alabama River” is dazzling. I can’t believe he’s not better known, but he will be, and soon.’PHILIP ROTH ‘This is as strong a collection as any I’ve read in recent years. The stories are collectively and individually brilliant, imbued with a high sense of Southern Gothic and a dark sense of humour.’Chicago Tribune
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