Miracle Boy and Other Stories — Pinckney Benedict

The story collection Miracle Boy and Other Stories contains fourteen works of short fiction written over the last fifteen years - and published in some of America's top literary magazines and anthologies - by one of West Virginia's most established and well-recognized writers of short fiction. The stories, all set in the author's native Appalachia, concern themselves with the lives of boys and men, all of them in some manner miraculous: from a boy who loses his feet and gains them again to a hunting dog that learns to talk. Though many of the stories contain supernatural or surreal elements, all are grounded in the realities of life in the Appalachian highlands. These are rough-and-tumble stories about a hardscrabble mountain landscape, and they modulate between love and violence, between beauty and abject terror.