Jennifer S. Davis's linked collection, We Were Angry, winner of the Press 53 Award for Short Fiction, introduces us to a group of friends in small-town Alabama whose lives are haunted by tragedies that reverberate across generations. In Davis's world, Alabama is more than a fictional setting. It's a scene for interrogating power, privilege, pain, and what it means to live in-and to leave-the American South. In lyrical, urgent prose shot through with dark humor, Davis offers glimpses of a land of contradictions: dollar stores and golf courses, dive bars and country clubs, and long-forgotten communities flooded to make way for mansions where missing women are rumored to be buried. Traversing these red dirt roads we find mothers and mourners, rebels and addicts, lovers, liars, prisoners, politicians, theme park enthusiasts, and collectors of rejected house pets-and we may be most surprised to find ourselves, "shocked . . . to see our own anguish staring, unblinking, back at us" like an uncanny face in the mirror we will not soon forget.
Jennifer S. Davis's linked collection, We Were Angry, winner of the Press 53 Award for Short Fiction, introduces us to a group of friends in small-town Alabama whose lives are haunted by tragedies that reverberate across generations. In Davis's world, Alabama is more than a fictional setting. It's a scene for interrogating power, privilege, pain, and what it means to live in-and to leave-the American South. In lyrical, urgent prose shot through with dark humor, Davis offers glimpses of a land of contradictions: dollar stores and golf courses, dive bars and country clubs, and long-forgotten communities flooded to make way for mansions where missing women are rumored to be buried. Traversing these red dirt roads we find mothers and mourners, rebels and addicts, lovers, liars, prisoners, politicians, theme park enthusiasts, and collectors of rejected house pets-and we may be most surprised to find ourselves, "shocked . . . to see our own anguish staring, unblinking, back at us" like an uncanny face in the mirror we will not soon forget.