New Stories from the South: 2004 by Robert Crais. Algonquin Books, 2004. $13.95 — 320 pp.

The short story surely holds a special place in the hearts of lovers of American literature. America has produced some internationally recognized short story writers — Hawthorne and Poe, Porter and Hemingway, Faulkner and O’Connor, Salinger and Carver, among others — as well as a host of capable story writers in the genres of science fiction, westerns, and hard-boiled detective fiction.

Southerners in particular seems to hold the short story in high esteem. In his “Preface” to New Stories from the South: 2004, Tim Gautreaux, a short story writer himself and a former teacher of writing at Southeastern Louisiana University, remarks that “Southern story writers reveal an embedded, complex need to communicate something they love ....” Southern storytellers also, Gautreaux observes, “love where they are from, warts included. In even the saddest of stories I can sense this love in the spaces between the words. I can hear it in the telephoned voices of friends who have moved North or West. As of yet, I haven’t met an expatriate Southern writer who doesn’t daydream about moving back.”

In New Stories from the South: 2004, we witness in story after story the love of the South and of things Southern. Shannon Ravenel, a native of Charleston, founded this series 19 years ago, and if the current book is indicative of the other 18 volumes, then Ravenel has made a significant contribution to both Southern and American letters.

“A Rich Man” by Edward P. Jones, the first story in the volume, sets the tone for New Stories in terms of excellence and form. Here Jones tells us the tale of Horace Perkins, a retired Army sergeant and sexual philanderer who cheats continually on his wife, Loneese. When his wife dies shortly after their joint retirement — she had worked as a secretary at the Commerce Department — Horace enters into a bizarre series of relationships with younger women which in turn bring him into a circle of drug dealers and con-men. Originally published in The New Yorker, “A Rich Man” gives us the story of a near mythic figure who is rich in worldly goods, at least compared to his companions, but who lacks intelligence, foresight, and any sort of moral grounding. Without resorting to didactics, Jones offers us a study of a man without direction, a man who thinks of the world in terms of physical pleasure and who therefore suffers his own ruination through the collapse and destruction of those pleasures.

Ingrid Hill’s “Valor,” first published in Image: A Journal of the Arts, shows us what great breadth of subject matter may be treated by a capable artist in a short piece of fiction. Hill’s story of an adolescent girl on a strange visit to a wealthy family outside of New Orleans covers subjects ranging from Rosa Parks to miscegenation, from the lives of the early Christian martyrs to the conflicts between the Old and New South. Like Jones, Hill is a veteran storyteller and winner of many literary honors (She is also the mother of 12 children, including two sets of twins, a circumstance which should stand in bleak rebuke to those who complain of lacking the time to write).

Several of the stories in New Stories examine family dynamics. Brett Anthony Johnston’s “The Widow,” for example, casts a powerful light on the relationship between a mother, the widow of the story, and the son who has become her principal caregiver. Minnie Marshall, 55, is dying of cancer, and as she prepares for death, planning her funeral and burial, she contemplates her past with her son Lee and Lee’s relationship with his father. Like all adept short story writers, Johnston understands the power of compressed language. Here he gives us the thoughts of Minnie near her death:

As the tears came, she wondered what else she’d forgotten or would forget, what else he was withholding. She wondered where the ducks had flown after the pond, if he remembered how much he enjoyed them as a child. She wondered if he would ever have children, who would be their mother and what they would know of their grandmother. She wondered if they would get any of her features. The only trait that seemed worth passing on was her new lovely hair, which, really, wasn’t hers at all.

Elizabeth Seydel Morgan’s “Saturday Afternoon in the Holocaust Museum” reveals ways in which modern culture has broadened the definition of Southern literature. Here a man and woman, facing an illness together, visit a local Holocaust museum in Richmond, Virginia. The locale and the Virginia accent make this story “Southern,” but we also see here the difficulty that arises in the labeling of regional stories in a world of computers, multiculturalism, and chain stores. Yes, there is a South, and that South is different from New England or the Northwest or the Midwest, yet we might easily argue that “Saturday Afternoon” could be set anywhere in the United States and still work equally as well as a story, thereby disputing Gautreaurx’s remarks about place in the “Preface.”

Yet Morgan’s story remains the exception, not the rule, of this volume and of the series as a whole. At the end of New Stories is an appendix of previous volumes in this series along with the titles and authors of each story in those volumes. These lists make a fascinating compendium of modern Southern authors: Mary Hood, Madison Smartt Bell, James Lee Burke, Lee Smith, Larry Brown, Jill McCorkle, and many more. We realize, those of us who have doubted whether “Southern writing” would last even another generation, that Southern literature, though altered just as the South herself has been so altered for better and for worse these last 50 years, remains alive and reasonably well.

(Jeff Minick is a writer and teacher who lives in Waynesville. He can be reached at saintsbookco@aol.com)