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.
"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
Matthew Neill Null is the author of the novel Honey from the Lion
(Lookout Books). A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, winner of the
PEN/O. Henry Award and the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize from the American
Academy of Arts and Letters, 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.
