cover image The Purchase of Order: Stories

The Purchase of Order: Stories

Gail Galloway Adams. University of Georgia Press, $14.95 (148pp) ISBN 978-0-8203-1040-4

The most recent winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, this collection is redolent with regional flavor. In the title story, we meet the Maxeys, a Southern couple who have come a long way from the hardscrabble early days of their marriageraising children in a trailer court, finding a friend in a goodnatured, somewhat slatternly neighbor who enjoyed the labor of raking a dirt yard. Now, better off, settled into a middle-class existence, they travel the country in their RV with no fixed destination, only a longing to meet up with the old friend they moved up and away from. ``Marva Jean Howard Confesses'' introduces a likable, fast-talking waitress who confesses she ``murdered'' a cow, and in the process of telling wins the amorous admiration of her law officer listener; ``he'd fallen in love with the way she emptied ketchup bottles.'' ``Inside Dope'' is an unusual love story, featuring a know-everything womanizer, Billy Lee Boaz,``only he's called Bisher,'' says an adoring little ex-sister-in-law. Ranging widely over the lives of authentic men and women and their idiosyncrasies, these 11 tales are impressive models of the storytelling art. (October)