If I'd been charged with assembling the information placed on the gold record accompanying the Voyager Space Probe today, I would have etched something like what Drifting in Awe became on the record. While cryptic in one moment, it is quite literal in another, an obvious wrestling with both clear realities and the mysteries making up who we are in this drifting world - a place deserving awe.

Drifting in Awe

Literature & Fiction

Thacker, Larry D.

Poetry

Finishing Line Press

Larry Thacker's new collection of 22 short stories, Labor Days, Labor Nights, with recurring characters has its share of quirky and amusing figures. The language is colloquial and relaxed for easy reading. The characters are working-class people dealing with the sometimes zany business of their lives. It is a story collection hard to put down. Some stories remind of a latter-day Eudora Welty, others have a hint of James Thurber. A fine collection to add to anyone's fiction library. --Ron Houchin, author of Talking to Shadows

Labor Days, Labor Nights: More Stories (Appalachian Writing)

Genre Fiction

Bottom Dog Pr

Humorous and wry stories of misfits and ordinary people in an Appalachian community struggling creatively to make sense of an often nonsensical world. "It seems like everybody but people from here are sure about what we're about, and they make money being wrong about it." The residents of Labor County, a fictional small community in the mountains of southeastern Kentucky, may be short on cash, but they are rich in creativity and tirelessly inventive as they concoct new schemes to make ends meet, settle old scores, and work off their debts to society and, in a way, to themselves. A zealous history professor is caught stealing from the local museum in protest of petty theft; an arsonist strikes it lucky--twice; a skilled leatherworker saddles a turkey and finds a rider; an angel aspires to be a punk rock Roller Derby princess; a grieving artist carves a miracle into a roadside rock face; and affable Uncle Archie produces a seemingly unending supply of new and bizarre items to display in his Odditorium. More than a collection of tales, Working It Off in Labor County assembles memorable characters who recur across these seventeen linked stories, sharing in one another's struggles and stumbling upon humor and mystery, the grotesque and the divine, each in many forms.

Working It Off in Labor County: Stories

United States

West Virginia University Press

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Books by Thacker, Larry D.