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Title: Poachers : Stories by Tom Franklin ISBN: 0-688-17771-9 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 30 May, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (29 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: SWEET HOMER ALABAMA
Comment: A nice debut by yet another blue collar southern bard. It reminds one of Harry Crews or Larry Brown. God help me for saying this, but Franklin portrays a kind of pastoral weirdness and brutality with an unflinching eye. At some point, readers are going to have to ask how much unflinching they can take.
Some of the early stories in the book are not as realized as they might be, but the payoff is the tour de force that is the title story at the end. "Poachers" is a memorable little novella that will leave readers looking forward to Franklin's novel.
Rating: 5
Summary: Gritty and Not Fun for Kitty
Comment: Tom Franklin is a terrific writer. His prose is sparse yet descriptive. Some might believe he's a slooshee made out of Ernest Hemingway, Larry Brown, and Raymond Carver. These stories will please fans of what the scowling (and snooty) independent bookseller with the "Give Peace a Chance" t-shirt called 'Oh, Southern GritLit fan are ya' when I dropped it at the cash register. These are stories about losers, dreamers, boozers, troublemakers, who carry on in the midst of self-imposed turmoil. I should warn the catlovers of the world (note: I gave a lovingly inscribed copy to Bessie for her birthday and bookmarked the Duane Juarez chapter) that there's a story in which cats (and kittens) get treated in an unkind manner. Of course, a lot of humans get treated poorly as well.
In any case, the writing is fabulous and the title novella is a bit of a chiller. Great beer-drinking reading and some of the finest writing I've seen in contemporary fiction. Oh, and a lot of these stories have a hint of humor to them, even in the midst of disaster. Good stuff and Heavy Hop Dop approves mightily.
Rating: 5
Summary: A book about loss, tragic loneliness, & snakebit lives
Comment: Friends. That's what I call my literary companions, my favorite books, the books that take me on a new and different journey every time I read them.
Tom Franklin's Poachers is a friend of mine. It's a book for the journey. An author, in my judgment, has nothing more to give than words for the public good, and Franklin delivers this with a bare-knuckle punch. Whether or not a writer has done his moral duty is proven in the reading of his work: I've read Franklin's book straight through three or four times over the past several years.
About Christmas 1999 I happened upon a copy of Poachers, a few months after it was published. I was, at the time, working at the state college in my hometown, moonlighting while I tried to learn how to write stories. I immediately perceived in Franklin's craft something to attain, a level of mastery needed if I was to tell stories about backwoods, rural, and New South industrialized blue-collar men and women. For several years, I had been groping earnestly for better stories. I was not a fast learner. But I had faith that if I kept writing, I would eventually publish fiction.
Part of the reason I took the job at the college was to study creative writing under Tim Gautreaux. With his instruction during an academic year, and literary models such as Poachers, I improved as a writer. I learned how to poach off another writer, and I had read Franklin more than any other author during the period. I would read individual stories and search for tips: How to handle scene, dialogue, point of view, and narrative techniques. After the apprenticeship with Gautreaux was finished, I started sending out my stories for the first time. I sent one piece to a literary review acknowledged in Franklin's book, a place where he'd been published. To my delight, the San Francisco-based journal Fourteen Hills published one of my first stories. Nine story publications have occurred in succession starting back in the fall of 2001 by magazines.
Franklin's stories are set three hours east of where I'm from, but I suppose his folks are much the same as mine, related by their sense of loss, their tragic loneliness, their snakebit lives. He knows my people, I know his. Just thinking about Poachers sitting on my shelf makes me want to take it down, and go straight through it a fifth time, to see if I can poach yet another story.
-------------------Reviewed by Dayne Sherman
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Title: Hell at the Breech : A Novel by Tom Franklin ISBN: 0688167411 Publisher: William Morrow Pub. Date: 27 May, 2003 List Price(USD): $23.95 |
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Title: The Clearing by Tim Gautreaux ISBN: 0375414746 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 17 June, 2003 List Price(USD): $23.00 |
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Title: Open House: Poems by Beth Ann Fennelly ISBN: 0970817754 Publisher: Zoo Press Pub. Date: March, 2002 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Unarmed and Dangerous: New and Selected Poems by Wyatt Prunty, John Irwin ISBN: 0801873762 Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ Pr Pub. Date: January, 2003 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: The Long Home by William Gay ISBN: 1878448056 Publisher: MacMurray & Beck Communication Pub. Date: September, 2000 List Price(USD): $13.50 |
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