Mason, Bobbie Anne Books

In Country (P.S.)

Bobbie Ann Mason

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 48 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Some people apparently don't get it. . . 5 out of 5 stars.
9 of 10 people found this review helpful.

After reading numerous reviews that refer to this book as "boring," I felt I needed to speak up against some of the semi-literate reviewers.

"In Country" is not an action novel. It's not meant to be a moral guide to living as a teenager. It's more than that, a complex, beautiful novel with multiple threads: about growing up, idenitity, place, war, and legacy. Mason is excellent at capturing the time and place of Western Kentucky; even though the town is never named, I'm certain she's writing about Mayfield, near where my husband grew up.

If you can't pass high school English, you probably won't enjoy "In Country." If you can appreciate a complex, emotional novel, one that makes you think, then this book is a modern classic.

Editorial Review:

In the summer of 1984, the war in Vietnam came home to Sam Hughes, whose father was killed there before she was born. The soldier-boy in the picture never changed. In a way that made him dependable. But he seemed so innocent. "Astronauts have been to the moon," she blurted out to the picture. "You missed Watergate. I was in the second grade."

She stared at the picture, squinting her eyes, as if she expected it to come to life. But Dwayne had died with his secrets. Emmett was walking around with his. Anyone who survived Vietnam seemed to regard it as something personal and embarrassing. Granddad had said they were embarrassed that they were still alive. "I guess you're not embarrassed," she said to the picture.

This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

Shiloh and Other Stories (Modern Library Paperbacks)

Bobbie Ann Mason

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Rural life in Kentucky 3 out of 5 stars.
5 of 11 people found this review helpful.

This collection of short stories is loved, even revered, by many fledgling short story writers, and with some legitimate reasons. Bobbie Ann Mason constructs a story well, and her characters behave as real people would. She rarely chooses to give the reader much of a sense of the landscapes in which she works, but when she does, she does it beautifully and economically. Frankly, though, I grew weary of the themes in her stories. In the middle of one of the stories, I think I screamed something like, "If I have to read one more story about dysfunctional relationships, I'm going to shoot myself!" I never did go through with it, in part because Mason does give the reader a taste of some likeable male characters in a few of the stories near the end of the book. I myself would never want to write stories which are, ultimately, as bleak as the stories in this collection, but Mason's bitter humor is often endearing, and her characters are interesting (if similarly crafted from story to story). If you want to read about people from rural Kentucky, read Wendell Berry instead; if you're looking for stories about relationships, read Joyce Carol Oates. Save this one for after you're read just about everything else.

Editorial Review:

"These stories will last," said Raymond Carver of Shiloh and Other Stories when it was first published, and almost two decades later this stunning fiction debut and winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award has become a modern American classic. In Shiloh, Bobbie Ann Mason introduces us to her western Kentucky people and the lives they forge for themselves amid the ups and downs of contemporary American life, and she poignantly captures the growing pains of the New South in the lives of her characters as they come to terms with feminism, R-rated movies, and video games.

"Bobbie Ann Mason is one of those rare writers who, by concentrating their attention on a few square miles of native turf, are able to open up new and surprisingly wide worlds for the delighted reader," said Robert Towers in The New York Review of Books.

Clear Springs: A Family Story

Bobbie Ann Mason, Random House Inc.

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 18 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Bobbie Ann Mason's marvelously tactile and textured memoir has the same blunt yet supple prose that distinguishes her novels In Country and Feather Crowns. Examining her roots in rural Kentucky, where she was born in 1940, Mason unravels her family's history and considers its impact on her as a person and a writer. Readers of the New Yorker will recognize a few excerpts, most notably the magical chapter on a local pop group in particular, and the siren song of rock & roll in general. Mason has woven the pieces of her story into a seamless whole limning her ambivalent relationship to her country roots. She was a bookish girl who fled to college and the sophisticated North before realizing that her fictional material and her heart were still down South. But when she bought land in Kentucky, it was "a long way from [home]. I had to keep some distance, keep my options open." Although her immediate family members all get loving, unsentimental treatment, the book is in essence a tribute to Mason's mother, whose free spirit never had a chance to roam as her daughter's did and who grabs center stage in the final chapter. This memoir is quintessential Mason in its strong storytelling, seeming simplicity, and deep mystery. --Wendy Smith

The Girl Sleuth

Bobbie Ann Mason

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Touring The Old Neighborhood 5 out of 5 stars.
17 of 22 people found this review helpful.

Reading The Girl Sleuth was like getting in a car with a friend at the wheel and going back to the neighborhood where we lived from ages 10 - 12. Together we uncovered the probable reasons why my mother and the school librarian disapproved of Nancy Drew and what those series mysteries did for our self images as women. The overt mainstream racism of the earlier editions of the series books is shocking; it gives me some comfort to think that our culture has grown up in the last few decades to understand how very wrong that thinking was. This book was completed in 1975 when Mason was a young post-doc coming off a Nabokov dissertation. It is relatively free of scholarspeak, though the feminism and Freudian references are starkly of their time. It's not dated, however: Mason writes from the heart as well as the mind and this slim book is a timeless good ride.

Editorial Review:

The author of Feather Crowns examines the girl detective in her various guises--including Cherry Ames, Nancy Drew, and Trixie Belden--in a work first published in 1975 recalling a rural youth spent longing for mysteries. Reprint. UP.

An Atomic Romance: A Novel

Bobbie Ann Mason

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

This provocative, rollicking story is the much-anticipated new novel–the first in over a decade–from acclaimed author Bobbie Ann Mason. In An Atomic Romance we meet Reed Futrell, a sexy, thoughtful hero who grapples with radioactive contamination, a midlife crisis, and string theory–all while falling in love.

Reed is an engineer at a uranium-enrichment plant near a riverside city in heartland America. He has deep roots in this community: He was raised there; his father worked at the very same plant before him. And it was here that Reed met, married, and then divorced his wife. Reed spends countless nights camping at a local wildlife preserve, gazing at the stars, fishing and hunting–that is, until deformed frogs are discovered at the site. Though his father was killed in a tragic accident at the atomic plant years ago, Reed stays on, proud to perform demanding and dangerous work for the benefit of the nation. As for the radioactive “incidents” he has endured, Reed prefers to think about other things–Hubble photographs of distant galaxies, Albert Einstein, his dog.

Reed’s casual attitude toward danger infuriates his on-again-off-again girlfriend, Julia, as much as his quirky mind and muscular body intrigue her. Julia, a biologist, is truly Reed’s match–or maybe more than his match. They both are witty, curious, and fascinated by science. Indeed, their courtship began with banter about Stephen Hawking’s theories of space-time, and ever since it has been an up-and-down adventure of sexual attraction, intellectual game-playing, and long silences when Julia refuses to return Reed’s calls.

When news reports reveal evidence of radioactive pollution in the land surrounding the plant, Reed and Julia’s relationship faces an unprecedented challenge. In An Atomic Romance, Bobbie Ann Mason delivers a brilliant novel set against a backdrop of atomic power: a love story between a motorcycle-riding loner and an independent, strong-minded biologist; between the peaceful present in a typical American community and the nation’s violent nuclear past; and, finally, between a good man and the work he takes pride in, though it may be putting his life in danger.

Feather Crowns

Bobbie Ann Mason

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Set in the apocalyptic atmosphere of 1900--a time when many Americans were looking for signs foretelling the end of the world--Feather Crowns is the story of a young woman who unintentionally creates a national sensation. A farm wife living near the small town of Hopewell, Kentucky, Christianna Wheeler gives birth to the first recorded set of quintuplets in North America.

Christie is suddenly thrown into a swirling storm of public attention. Thousands of strangers descend on her home, all wanting too see and touch the "miracle babies." One visitor crawls right in through the window! The fate of the babies and the bizarre events that follow their births propel Christie and her husband far from home, on a journey that exposes them to the turbulent pageant of life at the beginning of the modern era.

Richly detailed and poignant, Feather Crowns focuses on one woman but opens out ultimately into the chronicle of a time and a people. Written in Bobbie Ann Mason's taut yet lyrical prose, the novel ranges from a peaceful farming community to a fire-and-brimstone revival camp, from seamy traveling shows to the hushed precincts of the nation's capital. Moving through the center of it all is Christie, a charming, headstrong, loving woman who struggles heroically to come to terms with the extraordinary events of her long life.

Feather Crowns is an American parable of profound resonance. Spellbindingly readable, it is a novel of classic stature destined to confirm Bobbie Ann Mason as one of America's most important writers.

Midnight Magic: Selected Stories of Bobbie Ann Mason

Bobbie Ann Mason

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Readers of Bobbie Ann Mason looking for something new won't find it in Midnight Magic; this collection of 17 stories culled from two previous collections, Shiloh and Other Stories and Love Life, is more likely to satisfy fans who can be content with a compendium of greatest hits. Since her debut in the early '80s, Mason has been part of a group of writers from the new South--authors who, though they share the same geography with old masters like William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor, bring an entirely different perspective to it. Gone are the pages-long parenthetical paragraphs of Faulkner; gone are O'Connor's acute renderings of Southern psychology. Mason's characters wouldn't recognize psychology if it rose up and bit them on the keister. This is a world of shopping malls, daytime TV, and unsteady employment, an ethos in which not-so-genteel poverty extends to the imagination as well as the bank account. Brand names and the titles of television shows serve as mile-markers in these stories, and Mason's (often) unemployed heroes and big-haired heroines are only vaguely aware of living lives of quiet desperation. Mason draws these portraits of real life with precision; her accretion of details work hard to bring the reader so deeply into the picture that you can see the crumbs of Wonderbread on the Formica countertops and smell the stale Old Milwaukee on the Sunday morning after Saturday night. Yet as precise and colorful as Mason's images are, in the end they are much like photographs--remarkable in the clarity of what they show, yet only hinting at what goes on in the hearts and minds inside the characters they portray.

Nancy Culpepper: Stories

Bobbie Ann Mason

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Kentucky native Nancy Culpepper boldly left home to attend school in Massachusetts, married a Yankee, and raised her son in the Northeast. “One day I was feeding chickens and listening to Hank Williams and the next day I was expected to know what wines went with what,” she tells her husband, Jack. Yet no matter where she travels, her rural southern heritage is never far from her thoughts, her habits, and her heart.

Nancy is on a lifelong quest to understand her place in the world. Returning home to the family farm, she searches for photographic evidence of an ancestor bearing her own name. Still in her jeans, she brings home strange ideas and an assertiveness she learned up north.
Always adventurous, Nancy travels far and wide–searching, seeking. The narrative sweep of her life traverses the turbulent sixties, the Vietnam War, the eighties and the foreboding death of John Lennon, and finally the new millennium–when a self-assured Nancy finally emerges. These humorous and often touching stories recount her courtship and marriage to Jack, her relationship with her precocious son, and the deep, loving bond between her parents, Spence and Lila Culpepper. Eventually Nancy’s marriage is threatened by a cultural divide that plagued her and Jack from the start. But when she inherits the Culpepper family farm and discovers more pieces of her ancestral puzzle, she realizes that her life is assuming its proper shape. Later, standing on a lonely mountain in England, she sees the world from a surprising perspective.

Bestselling author Bobbie Ann Mason’s prizewinning Nancy Culpepper chronicles have appeared in The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, The Southern Review, and other distinguished literary anthologies. She has compiled these stories into one definitive collection, which includes the novella Spence + Lila, two new, never-before-published stories, and one Pushcart Prize winner. Heartfelt and thought-provoking, Nancy Culpepper is a poignant depiction of change and growth in a modern-day heroine.


From the Hardcover edition.

Spence And Lila

Bobbie Ann Mason

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

A Wonderful Short Novel 4 out of 5 stars.
6 of 7 people found this review helpful.

This is a very short novel about a rural couple who have been married for more than forty years and the confusion and stress they face as the wife is hospitalized. It is a refreshing alternative to more popular and yet more sentimental stories that deal with spousal, parental, and sibling relationships and the conflicts associated with aging and mortality. Mason is a fine writer.

Editorial Review:

Since the night they eloped as teenagers over forty years ago, Spence and Lila have spent a lifetime together. Now Lila has been diagnosed with breast cancer and faces surgery. Spence visits her in the hospital, but the notion of losing his wife is sometimes more than he can bear. He retreats to his fields, to his dog, and to the garden Lila has tended so lovingly through the years.

While the children rally to their mother and the neighbors stock the refrigerator, Spence and Lila each recall moments, spent together and apart, that have infused their shared life with subtle, unspoken meaning. Harmoniously, their strands of memory twine into a single narrative, revealing the humor, perseverance, and faith essential to turning two ordinary people into one enduring and happy union.

The American Claimant (1892) (Oxford Mark Twain)

Mark Twain

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

"The American Claimant is enormous fun. I'm here to celebrate the mad energy of this strange novel. In it we have the pleasure of seeing Mark Twain's imagination go berserk," writes Bobbie Ann Mason in her introduction. The American Claimant is a comedy of mistaken identities and multiple role switches--fertile and familiar Mark Twain territory. Its cast of characters include an American enamored of British hereditary aristocracy and a British earl entranced by American democracy. The central character, Colonel Mulberry Sellers, is an irrepressible, buoyant mad scientist, Mason writes, "brimming with harebrained ideas. Nothing is impossible for him.... He's totally loopy." His voluble wackiness leaves the reader reeling in the wake of inventions that prefigure DNA cloning, fax machines, and photocopiers. Twain uses this over-the-top comic frame to explore some serious issues as well--such as the construction of self and identity, the role of the press in society, and the moral and social questions raised by capitalism and industrialization in the United States. A unique melange of science fiction and fantasy, romance, farce, and political satire, Twain's least-known comic novel is both thought-provoking and entertaining.