Burning Bright

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More About This Book

Overview

New York Times bestselling and award-winning author Ron Rash is "a storyteller of the highest rank" (Jeffrey Lent) and has won comparisons to John Steinbeck, Cormac McCarthy, and Gabriel García Márquez. It is rare that an author can capture the complexities of a place as though it were a person, and rarer still that one can reveal a land as dichotomous and fractious as Appalachia—a muse; a siren; a rugged, brutal landscape of exceptional beauty, promise, and suffering—with the honesty and precision of a photograph. "If you haven't heard of the Southern writer Ron Rash, it is time you should" (The Plain Dealer).

In Burning Bright, the stories span the years from the Civil War to the present day, and Rash's historical and modern settings are sewn together in a hauntingly beautiful patchwork of suspense and myth, populated by raw and unforgettable characters mined from the landscape of Appalachia. In "Back of Beyond," a pawnshop owner who profits from the stolen goods of local meth addicts—including his own nephew—comes to the aid of his brother and sister-in-law when they are threatened by their son. The pregnant wife of a Lincoln sympathizer alone in Confederate territory takes revenge to protect her family in "Lincolnites." And in the title story, a woman from a small town marries an outsider; when an unknown arsonist starts fires in the Smoky Mountains, her husband becomes the key suspect.

In these stories, Rash brings to light a previously unexplored territory, hidden in plain sight—first a landscape, and then the dark yet lyrical heart and the alluringly melancholy soul of his characters and their home.

Editorial Reviews

Janet Maslin
Ron Rash was the seasoned author of nine books of fiction and poetry before his 10th, the stunning 2008 Serena, established him as one of the best American novelists of his day. With its stark Appalachian setting, piercing language and coolly ferocious title character, Serena was a big book filled with bleakly beautiful details. Mr. Rash's artistry was blinding enough to eclipse his craftsmanship. But the skill with which his tales are constructed is more apparent in Burning Bright, a new book of stories. The short-story format lacks the novel's complexity but has similar impact. And these pared-down tales make it much easier to see how expertly Mr. Rash fine-tunes his work.
—The New York Times
Michael Lindgren
A slender set of spare and menacing depictions of the unforgiving ways of life in rural Appalachia, Burning Bright finds a narrow sweet spot between Raymond Carver's minimalism and William Faulkner's Gothic…Rash gets deep inside the peculiar psychology and emotional idiosyncrasies of the denizens of the mountain South in all their pride, superstition and propensity for sudden violence.
—The Washington Post
More Reviews (12) Fewer Reviews
Publishers Weekly
The latest from Rash (Serena), a collection, begins with “Hard Times,” in which a struggling farmer in the midst of the Great Depression tries to discover who's stealing eggs from his henhouse without offending the volatile pride of his impoverished neighbors. The present-day stories are also situated in poverty-plagued small towns whose young citizens are being lost to meth addictions: in “Back of Beyond,” a pawnshop owner has to intervene when he learns his nephew Danny has kicked his parents out of their house and sold off their furniture to support his habit; in “The Ascent,” a young boy lovingly tends to a couple of corpses—victims of a small plane crash. Rash's stories are calm, dark and overtly symbolic, sometimes so literal they verge on redundant: in “Dead Confederates,” when a man falls into the Confederate tomb he's looting, the graveyard caretaker notes: “I'd say he's helped dig his own grave.” With a mastery of dialogue, Rash has written a tribute and a pre-emptive eulogy for the hardworking, straight-talking farmers of the Appalachian Mountains. (Mar.)
Library Journal
The stories in Rash's (Serena) aptly titled new collection burn themselves on the memory in much the same way as the photographs Walker Evans took of Southern sharecroppers in the 1930s that were later collected in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Rash's spare narratives are set primarily in today's Appalachia, with families decimated by poverty, drugs, and every other discernible kind of heartache. A pawnshop owner knows all the local addicts by virtue of the junk they bring in for money and becomes an unlikely hero when one of these deals uncovers a family member's disgrace. A husband who no longer knows how to talk to his wife elicits our sympathy even after he communicates his message by slashing her tires. A neglected boy with meth-addict parents finds treasure in a plane wreck he happens upon when his wanderings lead him into Smoky Mountains National Park. VERDICT Rash, who has authored not only fiction but also three volumes of poetry, is a master craftsman who pares down language to its essential elements in these starkly beautiful stories.—Sue Russell, Current Science, Inc., Philadelphia
Kirkus Reviews
Searing collection of short fiction from critically acclaimed Rash (Serena, 2008, etc.)The scourge of meth addiction ravages North Carolina's mountain communities in three of these 12 stories. For Devon, playing guitar for the wasted wretches at a funky roadhouse in "Waiting for the End of the World," it's mordant humor that gets him through the night. "The Ascent" takes a closer look at the human consequences of meth use. To escape a miserable home life with his zonked-out parents, 11-year-old Jared goes climbing and discovers a crashed plane. Pilot and passenger are dead, yet the boy finds it "snug and cozy" inside; there can be no happy ending for his fantasy about a different home. Even more devastating is "Back of Beyond," the collection's standout. Parson's customers are addicts. This doesn't bother the hard-boiled pawnbroker, but it gets personal when Parson learns that his thieving, strung-out nephew Danny has driven his brother and sister-in-law out of their remote farmhouse. There's a shocking image of the old folks huddled fearfully under the covers in Danny's trailer, but Rash knows how to evoke suffering without beating up his readers. In "Hard Times," we meet a farming couple barely making it during the Depression; tracking down an egg thief makes for high drama. "Lincolnites" goes back to the Civil War to show a young wife, alone on the farm while her husband serves in the Union army, heroically holding off a marauding Confederate soldier. The violence in both these stories is sudden, deadly and over in a blink, a Rash trademark. The end comes just as quickly and unexpectedly in the contemporary "Dead Confederates," a macabre account of a rascal literally digging his owngrave. Also of note are the title story, in which a widow pays a high price for staving off loneliness, and "The Corpse Bird," which pits ancient country lore against modern medical self-assurance. A nicely varied feast from a master of the form. Author tour Asheville, N.C., Atlanta, Charlotte, Knoxville, Nashville, Raleigh/Durham
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“A finely crafted, understated collection of 12 stories....Rash writes the way the old bluegrass musicians sing: in a stark, high-lonesome voice capturing the yearning and despair of characters who have lost almost everything but their pride.”
Huffington Post
“Ron Rash is a writer of quiet and stunning beauty... The stories in BURNING BRIGHT are beautiful. Each story is luminescent, deeply communicative of Appalachia and perfectly framed with sentences both lyrical and grounded.”
Miami Herald
“These are hard stories. These are hard people. But their troubles are never anything less than compelling...Rash has a feel for Appalachia and its ways, its rough justice, its loyalties... [Rash] has written a memorable, if often brutal, elegy for a vanishing way of life.”
San Diego Union-Tribune
“Ron Rash (SERENA) delivers compelling bleakness in BURNING BRIGHT, a collection of powerful short stories set in the hardscrabble towns of Appalachia.”
San Francisco Chronicle
“For the past 15 years, Ron Rash has been carving out a position as one of the best writers in America writing about Appalachia... BURNING BRIGHT is raw, honest and assured.”
The Oregonian (Portland)
“Finely drawn stories...a collection to be read for the quality of the prose, which reflects Rash’s intimate knowledge of this region and its history. His heart is clearly in this place .”
Time Out New York
“Rash...is at the top of his game.”
Vogue
“The ferally beautiful stories in Ron Rash’s BURNING BRIGHT evoke Appalachians of a Civil War past-- and a meth-blighted present-- with the haunting clarity of Walker Evans photographs.”
Washington Post
“A slender set of spare and menacing depictions of the unforgiving ways of life in rural Appalachia, Burning Bright finds a narrow sweet spot between Raymond Carver’s minimalism and William Faulkner’s Gothic.”

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780061804120
  • Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
  • Publication date: 2/1/2011
  • Edition description: Reprint
  • Pages: 205
  • Sales rank: 194,614
  • Product dimensions: 5.20 (w) x 7.90 (h) x 0.60 (d)

Meet the Author

Ron Rash is the author of the 2009 PEN/Faulkner finalist and New York Times bestselling novel Serena, in addition to three other prizewinning novels, One Foot in Eden, Saints at the River, and The World Made Straight; four collections of poems; and four collections of stories, among them Burning Bright, which won the 2010 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, and Chemistry and Other Stories, which was a finalist for the 2007 PEN/Faulkner Award. Twice the recipient of the O. Henry Prize, he teaches at Western Carolina University.

Table of Contents

Hard Times 3

Back of Beyond 19

Dead Confederates 45

The Ascent 75

The Woman Who Believed in Jaguars 91

Burning Bright 107

Return 127

Into the Gorge 133

Falling Star 153

The Corpse Bird 165

Waiting for the End of the World 181

Lincolnites 193

Acknowledgments 207

Customer Reviews

Average Rating 4.5
( 14 )

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Sort by: Showing all of 14 Customer Reviews

  • Posted May 8, 2012

    Moving stories!

    These stories are moving and have stayed with me long after I finished reading. Rash is a talented writer who must work hours and hours on historical research, making his stories believable and broad.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted January 28, 2012

    M..ggffpg ?llkkikoooijyytreerww

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  • Posted August 29, 2011

    nice collection

    Another nice collection of short stories by Ron Rash. But leaves me hungering for another novel - which is what I'd gone in search of when I found this collection. If you've not read his novels - you will want to - and will eagerly await the next one as do I still.

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  • Posted July 18, 2011

    A wonderful writer

    I was really put in the mood to read this after reading his story the trusty in the new yorker. It was terrific. Last summer i read serena and thought it was tremendous. I really want to read another novel by him. His voice is so true and i love his portrayal of the mountain people.

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  • Posted January 14, 2010

    more from this reviewer

    This superb intense twelve story collection focuses on the people of Appalachia

    This superb intense twelve story collection focuses on the people of Appalachia who though impoverished refuse to give up their pride even as they seek a shimmer of happiness. The well written stories are very short with the longest being 30 pages; yet each goes deep baring the darkness of the soul with slight flickers of light that sputter allegorically.

    Opening with "Hard Times" in which a Depression Era farmer's wife insists the impoverished neighbors' dog is stealing their eggs; when confronted the patriarch neighbor slices the throat of his canine to prove he was not the thief. Fishing for the felon proves shockingly successful. In sixteen pages, Ron Rash provides a cast of poor people struggling with survival but doing so with pride. That theme is throughout the anthology whether it is the young turning to meth "Back of Beyond" in which a pawn shop owner knows who the addicts are as they are his best customers including his nephew. "The Ascent" focuses on a tweener who makes a family with corpses in a crashed plane he finds. Whether he centers on the Civil War with "Dead Confederates" and "Lincolnites", the Great Depression ("Hard Times") or the present, Mr. Nash provides his readers with a profound look at the people of Appalachia where pride and hard work battle poverty and drugs.

    Harriet Klausner

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