Down Along the Piney is John Mort's fourth short-story collection and
winner of the Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction. With settings in
Florida, California, Mexico, Chicago, the Texas Panhandle, and, of
course, the Ozarks themselves, these thirteen stories portray the
unsung, amusing, brutal, forever hopeful lives of ordinary people. Mort
chronicles the struggles of "flyover" people who live not just in the
Midwest, but anywhere you can find a farm, small town, or river winding
through forested hills. Mort, whose earlier stories have appeared in the
New Yorker, GQ, and The Chicago Tribune, is the author of the
award-winning Vietnam War novel Soldier in Paradise, as well as Goat
Boy of the Ozarks and The Illegal. These ironic, unflaggingly honest
stories will remind the reader of Jim Harrison, Sherwood Anderson, and
Shirley Jackson.