Sparkman in the Sky & Other Stories

Brian Griffin grew up in the country near Soddy-Daisy, Tennessee, in a family he describes as infested by preachers, all Southern Baptists of the fundamentalist sort. He earned his B.A. in English from Middle Tennessee State University and his M.F.A. from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Griffin teaches creative writing at the University of Tennessee. He lives with his wife and children in Knoxville and works closely with a group there to promote interracial harmony in the inner city. Griffin's stories and poems have been well published in journals including Shenandoah, New Delta Review, Clockwatch Review, Snake Nation Review, and Southern Poetry Review. In addition to various short stories and poems, Griffin is currently at work on a novel. Brian Griffin's first work of fiction, Sparkman in the Sky, is like Hemingway's In Our Time in that it can be read either as a collection of short stories or as a discontinuous novel. From story to story, themes gather meaning until in the last one they are resolved or transposed into a new key. The first-person narrator may be named Hal or Ian or Victor, but by the end all these narrators have fused into a collective exemplar of how things go in a certain place in our time. . . . It's no knock on Brian Griffin to say that he has learned from Hemingway, among others. After all, Miles Davis was no less gifted a musician, no less original, for having learned from Dizzy Gillespie. And Griffin has his own original qualities, his own subtleties, his own sly humor-even a gift for farce. . . . This book is way beyond promising.-The New York Times Book ReviewGriffin's collection brings us into rural Tennessee community that is as multilayered and fascinating as any real town. The language is the straightforward vernacular one would hear when hanging out at a local bar or at the gas station, but, though it is often humorous, it is never quaint or condescending. This makes the insight of the characters all the more startling, as when the narrator of 'Goats: The Courtship of Dixie Pepper' realizes it's his own fault that his marriage is over, no matter how much he'd like to blame someone else. The effect of the Vietnam War o