The Current That Carries: Stories

by Lisa Graley

Overview

This collection bristles and hums with the rugged resilience one encounters in southern and Appalachian fiction where ghosts of loved ones and livestock alike haunt an underworld of lonely trails. Set in West Virginia, the stories take up residence with rural characters who defend their mailboxes against teenagers, bathe and feed their bedridden elders, and circle the inflated orbs of love and desire in high school gymnasiums. Whole lifetimes flare in an instant as characters scramble to sift through the past’s wreckage to find some small miracle in the present.

If there is nostalgia, it’s for a South without billboards, talk shows, and children with iPods dangling from their ears. It’s for a South where you can go pick a ripe tomato to slice for the mayonnaise on your sandwich because you found time to plant a garden. And if there’s grace, it is in the careful wading through a shifting current to reach possibilities snagged at the bottom of a trotline.

In lean, muscular prose, Lisa Graley pays homage to the daily chores that makeup a lifetime. With delicate precision, she renders the boundaries between fear and courage, indifference and compassion as thin as the blade of a shovel.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780820349886
Publisher:	University of Georgia Press
Publication date:	09/15/2016
Series:	Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction Series , #18
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	176
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

LISA GRALEY is the author of The Current That Carries, which received the 2017 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. She is an associate professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where she holds the Friends of Humanities/LEQSF Regents Professorship in the Humanities. She is the author of the book Box of Blue Horses, which won the 2012 Gival Press Poetry Award. She was awarded an ATLAS (Awards to Louisiana Artists and Scholars) sabbatical in 2009-10 by the Louisiana Board of Regents. Her stories have appeared in Glimmer Train, the Georgia Review, and the McNeese Review.

Editorial Reviews

The Current That Carries is profoundly in touch with the ways the world can reveal transcendent grace through the simplest things, the humblest things, even in the quotidian clutter of modern life and culture. These are ravishingly beautiful stories. Lisa Graley is truly an important new writer. Flannery O’Connor would have loved her sensibility, would have loved this book.

author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain - Robert Olen Butler

In this powerful and engaging debut collection The Current That Carries, Lisa Graley writes knowingly and powerfully about the nature of family in the rural world of small towns, as people struggle to take hard care of each other . . . and their animals. The stubborn hope living here is strongly reminiscent of the stories of Annie Proulx: All these lives at—or near—the end of the road reluctantly offering up their secrets.

author of Return to Oakpine - Ron Carlson

From a grandmother who writes a letter to Ron Howard imploring him to direct a movie about a community tragedy, to a son who discovers a tractor mysteriously buried in his recently deceased father’s grave, to a beloved goat that appears as a ghost to a man living out his last days, you will be surprised and enthralled by the terrain covered in The Current That Carries. Lisa Graley writes with compassion, empathy, and a deep understanding of characters struggling with identities and responsibilities, or simply with staying alive. These powerful and honest stories not only examine the fragility of the human body but, more importantly, the resilience of the human heart.

author of Faulty Predictions - Karin Lin-Greenberg

2016-07-02
Eight stories that give voice to incommunicable aspects of love and loss.Graley (Box of Blue Horses, 2013) sets these eight stories in Appalachia. Her characters are closely connected with the natural world; they chop wood, plow fields, and raise goats. Indeed, nature—its constant demands, its force, and its beauty—catalyzes much of the action in this collection. In the title story, a boy nearly drowns in a river. Though he survives, the incident quietly shifts the course of his life. In “Burying Ground,” characters gather to bury an old friend and discover that something is already buried in his plot. As Graley traces the history of relationships between neighbors, spouses, and families across generations, she reveals their attempts to not only commune with nature, but through it. At times, the metaphors can become a bit heavy. In “Heartwood,” a father with a failing heart describes the resilient but dead bark at the center of a tree to the adult child he does not fully understand. Most often, however, the parallels resonate profoundly. One particularly memorable piece opens with the sudden, violent illness of two dogs. A neighbor contemplates what, if anything, he can do to help the owner through it. “There are some sorrows you can’t enter....So I tell myself,” he says, articulating a unifying theme of the book. A subtle, powerful portrait of the strength and limits of human connectedness.

Kirkus Reviews