Jennifer S. Davis's linked collection, We Were Angry, winner of the
Press 53 Award for Short Fiction, introduces us to a group of friends in
small-town Alabama whose lives are haunted by tragedies that reverberate
across generations. In Davis's world, Alabama is more than a fictional
setting. It's a scene for interrogating power, privilege, pain, and what
it means to live in-and to leave-the American South. In lyrical, urgent
prose shot through with dark humor, Davis offers glimpses of a land of
contradictions: dollar stores and golf courses, dive bars and country
clubs, and long-forgotten communities flooded to make way for mansions
where missing women are rumored to be buried. Traversing these red dirt
roads we find mothers and mourners, rebels and addicts, lovers, liars,
prisoners, politicians, theme park enthusiasts, and collectors of
rejected house pets-and we may be most surprised to find ourselves,
"shocked . . . to see our own anguish staring, unblinking, back at us"
like an uncanny face in the mirror we will not soon forget.