Book Description

A year before he died, Jack Matthews (author of 10 story collections and over 30 books) was asked to suggest his 3 favorite stories from all his books for this story sampler. "Amos Smith, the Gunsmith" reaches into the folk tale tradition to produce a nice allegory about human labor. "A Woman of Properties" is a satirical suburban tale (reminiscent of Flannery O'Connor or Cheever) about a real estate agent with a grudge. "The Girl at the Window" is an unsettling and mysterious tale about our relationship to the past. Also included is an extended interview the author gave about the craft of writing in 2009. During his career as a writer, Mr. Matthews was distinguished professor of Fiction Writing at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio for over 4 decades. Winner of Guggenheim and several arts grants, Matthews has been anthologized widely, translated into several languages and nominated for a National Book Award. His own books have been praised by Eudora Welty, Anthony Burgess, Shirley Ann Grau, Tim O’Brien, Doris Grumbach, Walker Percy and a host of other famous and highly accomplished authors. "Mr. Matthews is a master of prose conversation and deadpan charm. He is ironic, cool, and shrewd, and he writes a lucid prose." (Tom O'Brien, New York Times) "Matthews' always graceful prose finds that precise telling detail. It's easy to fall in love with such writing." (Perry Glasser, North American Review) "Engaging wit and irony have been characteristic of Matthews's writing from the start, and both are strongly present in his latest gatherings of stories. His irony is increasingly darker, however, and his characters' obsession with memory and its distortions plays a more dominant role in this later work, much of which deals with death. For the most part, these are stories with deceptively simple and ordinary surfaces, but they are driven by powerful and ominous undercurrents, which often fuse the local and regional with the archetypal. Few can do it better. Without question, Matthews has established himself as one of America's finest storytellers." (Stanley Lindberg, editor, Georgia Review)