2011 Eric Hoffer Award in the General Fiction
2011 The Thomas & Lillie D. Chaffin Award
"Alex Taylor is a fresh new voice, not just in Kentucky, but in American
literature."'
--Chris Offutt
Like a room soaked in the scent of whiskey, perfume, and sweat, Alex
Taylor's America is at once intoxicating, vulnerable, and full of brawn.
These stories reveal the hidden dangers in the coyote-infested fields,
rusty riverbeds, and abandoned logging trails of Kentucky. There we find
tactile, misbegotten characters, desperate for the solace found in love,
revenge, or just enough coal to keep an elderly woman's stove burning a
few more nights. Echoing Flannery O'Connor and William Faulkner, Taylor
manages fervor as well as humor in these dusky, shotgun plots, where in
one story, a man spends seven days in a jon boat with his fiddle and a
Polaroid camera, determined to enact vengeance on the water-logged body
of a used car salesman; and in another, a demolition derby enthusiast
nicknamed Wife watches his two wild, burning love interests duke it out,
only to determine he would rather be left alone entirely. Together,
these stories present a resonant debut collection from an unexpected new
voice in Southern fiction.
Alex Taylor has worked as a day laborer on tobacco farms, as a car
detailer at a used automotive lot, as a sorghum peddler, as a tender of
suburban lawns, at various fast food chains, and at a cigarette lighter
factory. He holds an MFA from the University of Mississippi and now
teaches at Western Kentucky University. He lives in Rosine, Kentucky.
