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Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction
by Matthew Neill Null
A lyrical collection of short stories set in West Virginia.
Set in the author's homeland of West Virginia, this panoramic collection of stories traces the people and animals who live in precarious balance in the mountains of Appalachia over a span of two hundred years, in a disappearing rural world. With omniscient narration, rich detail, and lyrical prose, Matthew Neill Null brings his landscape and characters vividly to life.
"Starred Review. Breece D'J Pancake gets all the literary press out of West Virginia, what there is of it. But he's been dead nearly 40 years, and it's high time someone else did. Null is a natural writer with much to say." - Kirkus
"Violence is inevitable in these stories...but there is plenty of beauty, too. The scope of the collection contains voices from multiple generations, and the result is a kaleidoscopic portrait of a distinctive region of North America, as well as an exercise in finding the universal in the particular." - Publishers Weekly
"Memorable...Null's nine detailed tales explore the value of landscapes, both topographical and emotional, as well as the connections one clings to despite imminent wreckage." - Booklist
"Allegheny Front has few sentimental trappings... Men's stubbornness is a rock face, in these intelligent and unpretentious stories, their anger a crown fire, their occasional tenderness a rill... It remains at a distance from judgment, at a remove from easy definitions, unspooling a lucid and often painful history of appetite, exploitation, and bereavement." - Lydia Millet, from the introduction
"Rich in history, speech, incident, flora, fauna, vernacular, geology, politics - Matthew Neill Null's work is dazzling... If anything ever happened in the state of West Virginia, Null knows the long and short of it, and will make its story sing." - Salvatore Scibona
This information about Allegheny Front was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Matthew Neill Null is the author of the novel Honey from the Lion . A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a winner of the PEN/O. Henry Award, his short fiction has appeared in the Oxford American, Ploughshares, the Mississippi Review, American Short Fiction, Ecotone, and elsewhere. He divides his time between West Virginia and Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he coordinates the writing fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center.
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