In this Book
- How Far She Went
- Book
- 1984
- Published by: University of Georgia Press
- Series: Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction
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."
Table of Contents
- Lonesome Road Blues
- pp. 1-21
- Solomon's Seal
- pp. 22-29
- A Man Among Men
- pp. 30-48
- A Country Girl
- pp. 49-66
- How Far She Went
- pp. 67-77
- Doing This, Saying That, to Applause
- pp. 78-82
- Manly Conclusions
- pp. 83-92
- Inexorable Progress
- pp. 102-123