The lives of the working class in West Virginia--a train engineer, an
epileptic, coal miners and outlaws, the fragile and dispossessed--are
explored in this powerful yet tender collection of six short stories and
a novella. They depict an isolated world of hardship, human endurance,
and hard-won dignity and are a lyrical rendering of times and places now
largely gone--but the stirring clarity of people and landscape can
persist in the reader's imagination.