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    Something Rich and Strange: Selected Stories
    Something Rich and Strange: Selected Stories
    Something Rich and Strange: Selected Stories
    Audiobook15 hours

    Something Rich and Strange: Selected Stories

    Written by Ron Rash

    Narrated by Christian Baskous

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    From the acclaimed, New York Times bestselling award-winning author of Serena and The Cove, thirty of his finest short stories, collected in one volume.

    No one captures the complexities of Appalachia—a rugged, brutal landscape of exquisite beauty—as evocatively and indelibly as author and poet Ron Rash. Winner of the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, two O Henry prizes, and a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, Rash brilliantly illuminates the tensions between the traditional and the modern, the old and new south, tenderness and violence, man and nature. Though the focus is regional, the themes of Rash’s work are universal, striking an emotional chord that resonates deep within each of our lives.

    Something Rich and Strange showcases this revered master’s artistry and craftsmanship in thirty stories culled from his previously published collections Nothing Gold Can Stay, Burning Bright, Chemistry, and The Night New Jesus Fell to Earth. Each work of short fiction demonstrates Rash’s dazzling ability to evoke the heart and soul of this land and its people—men and women inexorably tethered to the geography that defines and shapes them. Filled with suspense and myth, hope and heartbreak, told in language that flows like “shimmering, liquid poetry” (Atlanta Journal Constitution), Something Rich and Strange is an iconic work from an American literary virtuoso. 

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateNov 4, 2014
    ISBN9780062383945
    Something Rich and Strange: Selected Stories
    Author

    Ron Rash

    Ron Rash is the author of the 2009 PEN/Faulkner finalist and New York Times bestseller Serena and Above the Waterfall, in addition to four prizewinning novels, including The Cove, One Foot in Eden, Saints at the River, and The World Made Straight; four collections of poems; and six collections of stories, among them Burning Bright, which won the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and Chemistry and Other Stories, which was a finalist for the 2007 PEN/Faulkner Award. Twice the recipient of the O. Henry Prize, he teaches at Western Carolina University.

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    Reviews for Something Rich and Strange

    4.5/5

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    • 5/5
      When you come across a Ron Rash story it’s usually the best short story you’ve read in a while, and it often lingers. But his true mastery of the form comes into clear view in a collection, especially this collection. Read one after the other, Rash’s stories are rich, evocative, carefully constructed, and often otherworldly good. And Rash knows how to pace a story. None is longer than it needs to be – you’re left wanting more but knowing it’s not needed.Several of the stories here are set in the historical context of war and its aftermath. WWII (Return), Afghanistan (Twenty-Six Days), but most often the Civil War. Rash explores how war affects fighting men and those that love them. The trauma of the Civil War (Shiloh, Lincolnites, Where the Map Ends) in particular, where towns and even families were divided by their loyalties.The stories with contemporary settings show a rural south ravaged by desperation, poverty, methamphetamine and the disruption of a society being dragged the modern day.“Three A.M. and the Stars Were Out”, about two widowers saving a calf, is about a good a story as it gets. “Their Ancient, Glittering Eyes” is the best fish story I’ve read. “The Corpse Bird” explores the tension between the “Rational. Educated. Enlightened” world and “people who believed the world could reveal all manner of things if you paid attention.” In “The Woman at the Pond” Rash gives the best description of dusk: “that hour when day and night made their slow exchange.”

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Great! This narrator sounds exactly like David Clark from Conyers, Georgia!!! Amazing!!!!

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Rash is remarkable! He can create a character you care for, deeply, in just a few pages. His stories are southern, ranging in time from the Civil War to contemporary events. There are soldiers and meth addicts. Slaves of then and now. His endings are almost always harsh twists; you cry, no!
    • 5/5
      Ron Rash is my favorite author. Most of these 34 heartbreaking stories come from his prior collections. They are all very fine - Rash tells each tale in a few riveting pages, and all the endings work well. Most are melancholy tales set in North Carolina, in the present working class misery or in the Civil War working class misery. Rash's characters, strong men and women, weak men and women, always come off the page and move into your blood and bones. My favorites: Last Rite, where a mountain woman's son is found murdered in no man's land, and she absolutely needs to know where he breathed his last, for his entry in the family Bible, and Shiloh, one of the two stories newly published in book form, where a Union soldier finds a worse enemy at home than on the battlefront. Do not miss these.