Drowned Boy: Stories (Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction)

"These [stories] are rust-belt blues, then, a vision of and lament for a past time and a swiftly changing place. They're not showy--the language is plain, the tragedy muted, the comedy low-key and wry--but they stick in the mind. Ray Carver would recognize these characters and situations, as would poet Philip Levine. I like to think that they would share my appreciation for this fine first book, built slowly and carefully over some years, and worth the wait."--Andrea Barrett, from the foreword
Jerry Gabriel delivers an unsentimental portrait of rural America in Drowned Boy, a collection of linked stories that reveals a world of brutality, beauty, and danger in the forgotten landscape of small-town basketball tournaments and family reunions. In "Boys Industrial School," two brothers track an escaped juvenile convict, while in the titular novella, a young man and woman embark on a haphazard journey to find meaning in the death of a high-school classmate. These stories probe the fraught cusp of adulthood, the frustrations of escape and difference, and the emotional territory of disappointment--set in the hardscrabble borderlands where Appalachia meets the Midwest.