A preacher held at knifepoint in a stranger’s cabin, another who absconds with his church’s funds and the wife of a parishioner; an elderly woman who slowly goes mad as she freezes to death; a renowned fiddler who returns home to die of AIDS; a gravedigger more comfortable with the dead than the living …

Sinful or righteous, imbued with hope or beyond redemption, each of these memorable characters struggles to endure, survive, or triumph over unplanned encounters with the people, forgotten or remembered, admired or scorned, who beset their lives.

These narrative threads are masterfully woven into the tapestry that is A Twilight Reel — a book full of surprises, dark fears, and unexpected humor, that echoes and distills the travails of any people, in any place.

Feathered Quill WINNER 2022

This new collection has been called “pure Joycean,” a “symphonic, nuanced portrayal of our contemporary Southern Highlands,” and “an extraordinary collection from an extraordinary writer.”

Its twelve interrelated tales are set over the course of a year—1999, as Y2K approaches and the world of Runion faces its own tumultuous changes. Like Thomas Wolfe’s Altamont, Runion stands in for places Cody grew up in and knows as only a native son can. Here he presents a vivid portrait of a community in an age of rapid change, learning how to understand and embrace the new despite the frequent pain and fear of the transition.

The stories

In the opening tale, a local preacher is taken captive by a fallen predecessor and struggles to escape before his own sins bring him down as well. As the winter progresses, an elderly woman inches closer to madness, and murder, as the freezing cold brings her inexorably closer to death.

In other stories, a music professor worries about his new life if he and his lover are the only gay men in a rural college town; and neighbors watch with trepidation as a failed church is prepared for a new, unsettling role—as a mosque for the area’s small but growing Islamic community.

Over the summer, a conservative local business owner faces the revelations that his own son, a young musician who left long before, is gay and HIV-positive—and has come home at last, but only to die. Months later, after vigilantes have burned him in effigy, the young fiddler uses his last burst of energy to give an impromptu farewell performance at the local drive-in theater—which, like him, is facing its imminent demise.

The autumn sees a widower rekindles dreams he once had of Marilyn Monroe, and a portrait of small-town death and birth emerges through visions of the dead that relentlessly visit a simple-minded gravedigger. Finally, as the year comes to an end and her last shift ends, a university custodian contemplates abandoning her husband and her small-town life in favor of stepping out into a world anxious with Y2K fears.

It’s no wonder that Robert Morgan (Chasing the North Star) says that “Cody’s is one of the most authentic and inspired voices in contemporary Appalachian fiction” who “speaks for both the region and the world beyond.” Or that Linda Parsons (Candescent) calls him “the masterful caller of the reel, leading us into mystery, time, a little magic realism, and possibly redemption—ever mindful of the living and the dead.”

And what greater praise can a writer achieve than these words from fellow Appalachian writer Leah Hampton:

What wonderful stories these are, rooted in mountains I know so well! Cody blends traditional and modern elements, wry humor, spooky darkness, and his intimate knowledge of the region to bring us a deftly rendered Appalachian story cycle…. This is a real gem.

A Twilight Reel is available now through bookstores everywhere, or through online retailers.

About the author >>

Those peoples range from Brazil’s northern states of Parà and Bahia, where the orisha Nanã personifies God as an old lady dressed in purple and white. Other cultures include the Sundarbans people, where Bonobibi is known as the goddess of the tiger as well as the mangrove forests, and, of course, mangrove communities across the Caribbean and West Indies, Australia, China, and Vietnam. With wonderfully evocative illustrations by Daniella Christian, the book is designed both to entertain and enlighten, and includes valuable information for classroom use.

Every purchase will help support the incredible Marvellous Mangroves Curriculum!

About the author >>

“His coat is patchy with age and matted here and there with the scars of many battles. One ear is gone and so is half his tail. But they’d disappeared so long ago that he couldn’t remember when he’d lost them, and it really didn’t matter anyway. For Oscar is tough and Oscar is a thinker.”

These tales describe how Oscar’s old neighborhood of Royal Avenue is threatened by developers trying to force out all the old residents. So Oscar gathers all the neighborhood’s cats and, together, they scheme and plan and form themselves into a fearless army to thwart the destruction of their homes. Written to appeal to readers from age six to early teens, Oscar and the Royal Avenue Cats is a fun, exciting gem of an adventure story, with an important message for young people (and grownups, too).

Oscar’s brilliant strategy and clever tactics against the unscrupulous money-men help ensure that the neighborhood stays strong and stable, and that the long-time residents, who may not be as sophisticated or well-off as their antagonists, deserve security and fair play. This beautiful book is a perfect gift for the young reader who’s ready to learn life’s lessons.

About the author >>

The other protagonists in this richly told collection of short stories could well sympathize with Clayton. Some struggle with idealism, others with innocence or what constitutes a healthy family, or such subjects as the dawn of premeditation, the function of art, estrangement from themselves, and whether it’s really possible to be selfless and in love.

Often humorous and always thought-provoking, MacTiernan’s Bottle invites readers to dive into the worlds that Hopping has created and discover the lives of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. Like a garden in perpetual bloom, these are stories to revisit again and again.

Praise from writers

Hopping’s characters range from old men to young women, and landscapes as diverse as an Ozark cave, a sleigh in Russia and a cramped airplane seat. He convinced me that his characters had not just life, but souls.

-Cheryl Dietrich, author, In Formation: Twenty Years Squeezing into an Air Force Uniform (due in 2012)

Images glide on the surface tension of thought. Textures and feelings are rendered in bright realism, yet, as we spend our few minutes of incarnation in the surface light, we are constantly reminded of the astonishing blackness beneath, where our stories are born.

-William Henry Price, artist and poet

You pick up MacTiernan’s Bottle for the pleasure of story. You linger for the beauty of language and the authority of narrative voice. You marvel at the cast of characters, who run the gamut from quirky to grave. Then, affectionately cursing the author, you think. And you think some more. In a literary world fraught with the flashy and the forgettable, you find the
mother lode: thirteen stories that linger in your mind.

-Elizabeth Lutyens, Editor, The Great Smokies Review

I’m at page 30 and cursing the urge to finish the whole bloody thing.

-Danny Ellis, singer-songwriter and author, 800 Voices

 

About the author >>