Burning Bright , livre ebook

PRAISE FOR Burning Bright
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. . . . But the skill with which his tales are constructed is more apparent in Burning Bright . . . . These pared-down short stories make it much easier to see how expertly Mr. Rash fine-tunes his work. . . . Elegantly sophisticated . . . enormously effective . . . remarkable stories. . . . Mr. Rash certainly knows how to rivet attention.
-Janet Maslin, New York Times
For the past 15 years, Ron Rash has been carving out a position as one of the best writers in America writing about Appalachia . . . a fascinating place for a writer to inhabit. This is what Rash does best, and his reputation is assured with his latest story collection, Burning Bright . . . . The Ascent is a heartbreakingly simple tale . . . but it still plows right into you. . . . [Rash] exhibit[s] an astonishing range . . . powerful and affecting. . . . Burning Bright is raw, honest and assured, the work of a talented writer. His characters fight through their tiny lives, proud and indomitable, like the land itself.
- San Francisco Chronicle
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 mountain South in all their pride, superstition and propensity for violence.
- Washington Post
Exquisite . . . a dozen tragically beautiful stories. . . . Rash is a praised writer, drawing comparisons to John Steinbeck and Cormac McCarthy, and those comparisons ring true here. In Hard Times, he produces the first of many images that sear into the brain. . . . It s haunting images like that, horrific, but utterly believable because of the desperate world Rash creates, that stay with the reader long after this book is finished.
- Minneapolis Star Tribune
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. . . . He uses his agility with sentence rhythm and word resonance to weave stories that are stark, even grim, and yet carry a lasting recognition of those moments of release that spark across even the bleakest of realities. . . . He is a writer gifted at expressing the sublimated and sublime hope of people hard-used by circumstance and long used to endurance. . . . The stories in Burning Bright could be bleak and depressing but under Rash s touch, both the characters and their lives instead speak of endurance, intuition, and grace.
-Huffington Post
In clean, forthright, powerfully resonating prose, Rash assuredly provides a glimpse of lives often bent and broken. 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.
- Miami Herald
Rash packs his sentences full of that exceedingly difficult mix of common language and poetry that the best Southern writers make appear so effortless: All the bad fixes I ve been in are like being in high cotton compared to where I am now. Rash, on the other hand, is at the top of his game.
- Time Out New York
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.
- Vogue
Ron Rash ( Serena ) delivers compelling bleakness in Burning Bright , a collection of powerful short stories set in the hardscrabble towns of Appalachia.
- San Diego Union-Tribune
Ron Rash brings his poet s eye to an unforgiving world in Burning Bright , a finely crafted, understated collection of 12 stories. . . . Rash doesn t need much to tell a story-in fact, emptiness brings out the best in him. 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. . . . In these spare and haunting stories Rash restores the humanity that trumps the meanness in this world. It may be a thin shard of hope, but it still burns bright.
- Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Finely drawn stories. . . . Burning Bright is 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-the dialect is pitch-perfect and he is a skillful translator of the inner worlds and difficult lifestyles of the unique, hardened-by-necessity breed of people who have populated the area, past and present.
- The Oregonian (Portland)
[The stories] display a universality that goes beyond time or place. . . . There is a purity and precision in Rash s prose, reminiscent of his poetry, that makes these stories as deceptively easy to read as they are hard to forget. This is memorable, unflinching short fiction by a master of the form.
- Booklist
BURNING BRIGHT
ALSO BY RON RASH
FICTION
Serena
The World Made Straight
Saints at the River
One Foot in Eden
Chemistry and Other Stories
Casualties
The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth
POETRY
Raising the Dead
Among the Believers
Eureka Mill

First published in the USA in 2010 by Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022
First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published by Canongate in 2011
Copyright 2010 by Ron Rash
The moral right of the author has been asserted
www.canongate.tv
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
eISBN 978 0 85786 134 4
Designed by Mary Austin Speaker
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the publications in which these stories first appeared: Hard Times in Sewanee Review ; Back of Beyond and The Ascent in Tin House ; Dead Confederates in Shenandoah ; The Corpse Bird in South Carolina Review ; Waiting for the End of the World in Oxford American ; Into the Gorge in Southern Review ; Burning Bright in Ecotone ; Return in Saltgrass ; The Woman Who Believed in Jaguars in Carolina Quarterly ; Falling Star in Crossroads ; Lincolnites in Smoky Mountain Living .
FOR SUE HOLDER RASH
CONTENTS
I
Hard Times
Back of Beyond
Dead Confederates
The Ascent
The Woman Who Believed in Jaguars
Burning Bright
II
Return
Into the Gorge
Falling Star
The Corpse Bird
Waiting for the End of the World
Lincolnites
Acknowledgments
BURNING BRIGHT
I
HARD TIMES
J acob stood in the barn mouth and watched Edna leave the henhouse. Her lips were pressed tight, which meant more eggs had been taken. He looked up at the ridgetop and guessed eight o clock. In Boone it d be full morning now, but here light was still splotchy and dew damped his brogans. This cove s so damn dark a man about has to break light with a crowbar, his daddy used to say.
Edna nodded at the egg pail in her hand.
Nothing under the bantam, Edna said. That s four days in a row.
Maybe that old rooster ain t sweet on her no more, Jacob said. He waited for her to smile. When they d first started sparking years ago, Edna s smile had been what most entranced him. Her whole face would glow, as if the upward turn of her lips spread a wave of light from mouth to forehead.
Go ahead and make a joke, she said, but little cash money as we got it makes a difference. Maybe the difference of whether you have a nickel to waste on a newspaper.
There s many folks worse off, Jacob said. Just look up the cove and you ll see the truth of that.
We can end up like Hartley yet, Edna replied. She looked past Jacob to where the road ended and the skid trail left by the logging company began. It s probably his mangy hound that s stealing our eggs. That dog s got the look of a egg-sucker. It s always skulking around here.
You don t know that. I still think a dog would leave some egg on the straw. I ve never seen one that didn t.
What else would take just a few eggs at a time? You said your ownself a fox or weasel would have killed the chickens.
I ll go look, Jacob said, knowing Edna would fret over the lost eggs all day. He knew if every hen laid three eggs a night for the next month, it wouldn t matter. She d still perceive a debit that would never be made up. Jacob tried to be generous, remembered that Edna hadn t always been this way. Not until the bank had taken the truck and most of the livestock. They hadn t lost everything the way others had, but they d lost enough. Edna always seemed fearful when she heard a vehicle coming up the dirt road, as if the banker and sheriff were coming to take the rest.
Edna carried the eggs to the springhouse as Jacob crossed the yard and entered the concrete henhouse. The smell of manure thickened the air. Though the rooster was already outside, the hens clucked dimly in their nesting boxes. Jacob lifted the bantam and set it on the floor. The nesting box s straw had no shell crumbs, no albumen or yellow yolk slobber.
He knew it could be a two-legged varmint, but hard as times were Jacob had never known anyone in Goshen Cove to steal, especially Hartley, the poorest of them all. Besides, who would take only two or three eggs when there were two dozen more to be had. The bantam s eggs at that, which were smaller than the ones under the Rhode Island Reds and leghorns. From the barn, Jacob heard the Guernsey lowing insistently. He knew she already waited beside the milk stool.
As Jacob came out of the he