The Rough Road Home: Stories by North Carolina Writers

North Carolina has produced a dramatic number of talented fiction writers in recent years, and their work is showcased in this, the first anthology of short stories for the state published in more than thirty years. The twenty-two stories collected here, all by contemporary writers with abiding North Carolina roots, were selected by Robert Gingher, the longtime book review editor of the Greensboro News and Record. The settings range from Maya Angelou’s Chicago jazz club to Kaye Gibbons’s dusty North Carolina countryside; the voices are black and white, male and female, old and young, privileged and poor. The journey away and back again provides the narrative framework for many of the stories. Picking up a theme that has an honorable association in the state, Gingher says, You can go home again, but it’s a rough road back. As Gingher readily admits, it is probably impossible to talk about something called North Carolina writing,
just as one can no longer speak confidently about southern writing. North Carolina, like the region, has changed profoundly in the last decades. But the stories that comprise this collection are a powerful testament to the continuing vitality of the Tar Heel state’s literary tradition.