Fishing for ghosts

Warm, gentle, funny, sometimes sad, these twelve stories weave common themes into a variety of patterns, each distinctive and yet related to the rest. Those themes - the humor and folktales of the rural Midwest, the bonds between generations and the friction those bonds create, the tensions between a character's country past and city present - are at once archetypically American and specific to each story's particular reality. In "Melting with Ruth," a visit home becomes an unlooked-for courtship of an unlikely sweetheart, culminating in a thoroughly unexpected new life. "Storying You" listens in on a yarn-spinning session among old and practiced (and somewhat slanderous) tall-tale tellers. And, in the story that gives the collection its name, the narrator recalls his grandfather, a man "strong and proud as a bull," who nonetheless teaches him that there is more than one way to be a man, not all of which involve fishing. As the title suggests, many of the stories in Fishing for Ghosts have to do with remembrance and loss, and as Richard Brown points out in the book's foreword, it will sometimes be natural for the reader to confuse the narrators with the author. But none of these stories are purely autobiographical; rather, Brown infuses his storytelling with the authenticity of his own experiences, and the result is a narrative voice that is genuine, playful, as rich as the good Missouri soil it springs from, and absolutely his own.