New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, 1999 - Tapa blanda

In this year's preface, Tony Earley writes, "It is easy to make up characters who live in double-wide mobile homes, wear beehive hairdos and feed caps, never put a g on the end of a participle, have sex with their cousins, voted for George Wallace, who squint and spit whenever an out-of-towner uses a polysyllabic word; who aspire only to own a bass boat, scare a Yankee, have sex with their cousins again, burn a cross, eat something fried, speak in tongues, do anything butt nekkid...What is difficult is to take the poor, the uneducated, the superstitious, the backward, the redneck, the 'trailer trash,' and make them real human beings, with hopes and dreams and aspirations as real and valid, and as worthy of our fair consideration, as any Cheeverian Westchester County housewife."

We couldn't agree more. Just as Tony Earley makes a plea for honest writing by challenging the stereotypes that wend their way through Southern literature, so Shannon Ravenel picks twenty singular writers who tell honest stories. Whether it's the Edgar-winning story of three orphaned brothers or the young girl who ends up in a strange motel room with a man she hardly knows or the old man who kills his son, every story here tells the honest truth about the South in unforgettable ways.