Product Description
After the stunning historical novels The Clearing and The Missing, Tim Gautreaux now ranges freely through contemporary life with twelve new stories and eight from previous collections. Most are set in his beloved Louisiana, many hard by or on the Mississippi River, others in North Carolina, and even in midwinter Minnesota. But generally it's heat, humidity, and bugs that beset his people as they wrestle with affairs of the heart, matters of faith, and the pros and cons of tight-knit communities—a remarkable cast of characters, primarily of the working class, proud and knowledgeable about the natural or mechanical world, their lives marked by a prized stereo or a magical sewing machine retrieved from a locked safe, boats and card games, and casinos, grandparents and grandchildren and those in between, their experiences leading them to the ridiculous or the scarifying or the sublime; most of them striving for what's right and good, others tearing off in the opposite direction.
Reviews/Praise
“Tim Gautreaux’s Signals is prime reading pleasure, rich and gritty stories of people clawing their way through thickets of thorny problems from rotten children to the ruined landscape, all leavened by wit and the dry humor of a hot and damp climate." —Annie Proulx
"Signals is the most entertaining and original story collection to come out of the American South in many years.” —Howard Frank Mosher
“Tim Gautreaux has long been one of my favorite writers, a literary artist with his own landscape and a distinctive insight into the human heart that’s both nuanced and wise.” —Robert Olen Butler
“Tim Gautreaux is a masterful American writer and his new collection a wonder: deeply insightful, comic in the Greek sense of comedy lying close to tragedy, with language that's supple and delightful. A singular accomplishment." —Jeffrey Lent
"Signals further confirms that Gautreaux is one of America’s greatest short story writers.” —Ron Rash