Collected Stories of Scott McClanahan
At long last, a collection of short stories from acclaimed West Virginia author Scott McClanahan. These thirty-three stories, pulled primarily from his early, now out-of-print collections, are snapshots from growing up in a small, rural Appalachian town. These works of autofiction are written in McClanahan’s incantatory, unpasteurized, and disarmingly tender voice that spins everyday experiences like kidney stones and stocking produce at the local supermarket, into something far more profound by transcending hyperlocal settings to reveal rare, bewitching, and genuine connections from author to reader.
These thirty-three stories’ backdrop centers on southern West Virginia, from where McClanahan hails, and contain what McClanahan simply witnessed, what he experienced personally, and then, finally, an acute awareness of the surroundings he finds himself facing in his hometown. McClanahan’s experiences of southern West Virginia allow these stories to transform from words on pages to something that feels as though they transcend hyperlocal settings to reveal rare, bewitching, and genuine connections from author to reader. The Paris Review describes the prose as “both comic and unpretentiously sentimental,” while The New York Times hails it “miasmic, dizzying, repetitive. A rushing river of words that reflects the chaos and humanity of the place from which he hails.”
Gleaned from McClanahan’s previous booksStories, Stories II, and Stories IV!, this collection of stories also debuts two new stories in print for the first time.
McClanahan’s earlier volumes received heaps of praise The Paris Review described the stories from McClanahan’s earlier volumes as “both comic and unpretentiously sentimental,” and The New York Times Book Review hailed it as “miasmic, dizzying, repetitive. A rushing river of words that reflects the chaos and humanity of the place from which he hails.”
This cloth edition includes sixteen original color illustrations by fellow Appalachian artist, Chris DeMaria and a foreword by award-winning short story writer Ashleigh Bryant Phillips.
Stories
The Last Time I Saw Randy Doogan
ODB, the Mud Puppy, and Me
The Rainelle Story
The Homeless Guy
The Chainsaw Guy
The Firestarter
The Prettiest Girl in Texas
The Baby Doll
Phone Girl
My Dad and the Cop
My Dad at the Race
My Dad
My Mom
Captain D’s
The First Time I Made Diamonds
Stories II
Kidney Stones
Hernia Dog
This is a Story with a Phone Number in It
The Couple
The Last Time I Stole Walt Whitman’s Sole
The Prisoners
Suicide Notes
Fable #1
Fable #2
The Future Teller
The Coal Train Sounds #1
The End
The Coal Train Sounds #2
The Histories of Scott McClanahan, or Stories VII
The Story of My Birth #1 and #2
The Golden Pen
My Second Birth
Floods
A Farewell
Earlier praise for stories in this collection:
“What must be recognized in McClanahan’s work is its shaped quality, when maybe he doesn’t want you to see that at all….All of this belies the accomplishment of the stories, how lean, lyrical, hard and humane they often are…McClanahan has found his own little postage stamp of native soil and writes about its people so convincingly that their problems and misunderstandings transcend to become instantly recognizable.” —Inside Higher Education
“McClanahan’s stories are primarily set in West Virginia and all told in the first person by the same narrator, a narrator who views the seemingly narrow lives of his community and family with reverence. These are not condescending stories. They can be funny, but never treat the eccentric, or impoverished characters as cartoonish or garish; indeed, they celebrate, with honor, the strangeness and beauty of them all.” —HTML Giant
“McClanahan’s stories raise the spectre of the South: highways curving through woods, trailers, deer, rifles, cheap beer, and small towns where life is slower but burning with human fever. His almost casually related tales deal with violence and love, apathy, and our need for connection with an immediacy that is captivating and reflective.” —Bomb Magazine
“Scott McClanahan is an author gifted with stating intuition implicitly. A part of our work as writers is to make sense, to distill, to state it both beautifully and with clarity, and yet in McClanahan’s most recent collection Stories II, not for a moment, does the writing feel put on, on purpose, pushed. However, in these 155 pages, we find ourselves bathed in truth, relating universally, unequivocally taken to these very specific and personal stories, stories written in a very distinct Southern/Appalachian dialect, at that.” — Dactyl Review
“McClanahan’s writing changed me. It must have been 2011 or 2012 when I first read his transcendental short story ‘Kidney Stones’ from Scott McClanahan: The Collected Works Volume1, and to use that terrible cliché–it was like someone switched on the light. Prior to that, I had not known, not even for a second, the degree to which humour could be used like a knife, but with that story, and in Crapalachia, Hill William and The Sarah Book, those deceptively simple, yet devastatingly tragic books published afterwards, he proved, at least to me, that if you were fearless enough you could tell any story, even, or especially, if they were painful; he showed me how to mix tragedy with hope” — The Sydney Review of Books
“McClanahan’s prose is miasmic, dizzying, repetitive. A rushing river of words that reflects the chaos and humanity of the place from which he hails. He writes in an elliptical fever dream so contagious that slowing down is not an option. It would be like putting a doorstop in front of a speeding train.” —The New York Times Sunday Book Review
“[A] matter-of-fact exploration of identity crises and existential doubt [that] reads like a modern Gogol gone small-town U.S.A.” —Pittsburgh City Paper
“His stories aren’t told as much as they are taken in and ephemerally woven through you, the ethereal imprint hanging heavy in the room.” —Electric Literature
