The letters to my father represented sorrow, hope, and, probably saddest of all, a willingness to suspend disbelief. They continued coming for years.

I was asking a different but related question from my previous one about small wild places: how little intimacy can I survive on?

This larger denial, Mathis posits, leaves white America prone to yearning for a time that never existed. We’ve come, unexpectedly, back to baseball.

Beauty is not what we see in the light, but how we imagine what we cannot see.

I find myself asking as I walk down a supermarket aisle: Why do my stories tend toward dread and disaster? Why can’t I write something with a happy ending?

Good stories often force us to reexamine our preconceived ideas.The typical Appalachian story unfolds to the taste of those outside our borders.

Their stories are tragic and funny, and always personal. The nunnery meant freedom to many women forced into prostitution or trapped in abusive homes.

So what do we want from our bookstores? Should we expect them to surprise us and deliver discoveries or to serve up exactly what we need?

It isn’t realism that pulls us beneath the fictional surface, but a mysterious weight, the gravity of a story that needs to be told.

For a long time, we saw reflections like Ron’s—milestones we wanted but hadn’t reached. But when Marie died, what Monica desired most was what she’d lost.