How Far She Went

Stories

Title Details

Pages: 136

Trim size: 5.500in x 8.500in

Formats

Paperback

Pub Date: 08/01/1992

ISBN: 9-780-8203-1441-9

List Price: $22.95

eBook

Pub Date: 03/15/2011

ISBN: 9-780-8203-4019-7

List Price: $20.95

How Far She Went

Stories

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  • Description
  • Reviews
  • Awards

Mary Hood's fictional world is a world where fear, anger, longing—sometimes worse—lie just below the surface of a pleasant summer afternoon or a Sunday church service.

In "A Country Girl," for example, she creates an idyllic valley where a barefoot girl sings melodies "low and private as a lullaby" and where "you could pick up one of the little early apples from the ground and eat it right then without worrying about pesticide." But something changes this summer afternoon with the arrival at a family reunion of fair and fiery Johnny Calhoun: "everybody's kind and nobody's kin," forty in a year or so, "and wild in the way that made him worth the trouble he caused."

The title story in the collection begins with a visit to clean the graves in a country cemetery and ends with the terrifying pursuit of a young girl and her grandmother by two bikers, one of whom "had the invading sort of eyes the woman had spent her lifetime bolting doors against."

In the story "Inexorable Process" we see the relentless desperation of Angelina, "who hated many things, but Sundays most of all," and in "Solomon's Seal" the ancient anger of the mountain woman who has crowded her husband out of her life and her heart, until the plants she has tended in her rage fill the half-acre. "The madder she got, the greener everything grew."

'Melodies low and private as a lullaby': these are what the country girl of 'A Country Girl' sings and are a fair description of Mary Hood's writing at its best.

New Yorker

[Stories] clear and compact as ancient poetry, and shockingly shrewd about the mysteries of human sadness.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A first collection by an author with a great talent for shattering insights into her North Georgia rural characters. . . . Supremely successful.

Kliatt

Winner

25 Books All Georgians Should Read, Georgia Center for the Book

Winner

Whiting Award, Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation

Winner

Southern Review/L.S.U. Short Fiction Award, Southern Review

About the Author/Editor

MARY HOOD is also the author of Familiar Heat and How Far She Went (Georgia), a winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. Her work has been published in the Georgia Review, North American Review, and Yankee, among other publications.