Ben Forkner

This was a wonderful collection. It had some authors who are familiar (Mark Twain, Richard Wright, William Faulkner, etc.) and some whom I had never heard of (Arna Wendell Bontemps, Charles Egbert Craddock, etc.), but generally all the stories were interesting. Some, of course are better than others, and I think the ones by the more familiar authors explain why they are more familiar! The authors chosen represented men and women, black and white, rich and poor, and the stories ranged from New Orleans to Maryland, so I think it was a good cross section. Most of the tales were written between the Civil War and 1920. Well worth the read! My favorite stories were by Mark Twain, O. Henry, and Faulkner.… (more)

Although May is not supposed to be the depths of winter we have had unseasonably cold temperatures and lots of rain (snow in some parts of the province) so it was nice to sink myself into the stories from Mississippi and Arkansas and Georgia and all the other southern states.

If I had to pick a favourite I think it would be O. Henry's "A Municipal Report" set in Nashville. I know his story "Gift of the Magi" well but this was quite a bit different and certainly couldn't be written by any other than a Southerner. "How Sharp Snaffles got his Capital and his Wife" by William Gilmore Simms is one of those tall tales that used to abound but seems to have gone by the wayside. The story by Thomas Wolfe "The Bell Remembered" is another favourite from this selection. These stories were even educational. "First Love" by Eudora Welty was about Aaron Burr and his trial for treason. I had only ever heard of Aaron Burr in connection with the Hamilton-Burr duel and at first I thought it was about that. I had to go to Wikipedia to learn that Aaron Burr, after the duel, was accused of treason for trying to steal lands in the Louisiana Purchase, a crime of which he was acquitted.… (more)

I bought this anthology because of the short short story by Harry Crews, but stayed to enjoy several others in the book. I especially loved Carson McCullers' "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe." Forkner righteously says he picked from stories set in Georgia, not necessarily from Georgia writers, per se. And what regional anthology doesn't do that? I'm sure there have been Spanish, Cuban, Idaho, Key West, Michigan and Illinois anthologies, all claiming Ernest Hemingway as their own. It's the nature of the beast.

What was good about this collection is that Forkner chose writers that wrote, for the most part, in the Georgia vernacular. This is not an easy thing to do! One must be intimately familiar with the vowels, consonants, umblots, and other accents to write this way. Some have tried to their chagrin.… (more)