My Lord Bag of Rice: New and Selected Stories

by Carol Bly

The Upper Midwest, with its scattered small towns and bitter winters, is Carol Bly's source for stories that are, as Tobias Wolff says, "as particular in their settings and culture as those of Turgenev and Joyce and Flannery O'Connor, and as far from being simply regional."

My Lord Bag of Rice collects Bly's best and most recent work, 11 stories fortified with sharp-eyed characters who stand a little apart from their routine,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1571310312
• ISBN13: 9781571310316
• Release Date: February 2000
• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Length: 326 Pages
• Weight: 1.32 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.1" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

The extraordinary grace of ordinary people

Carol Bly's stories call me home. She captures nuances of Midwest culture, and in particular, aches in the souls of Midwest women, with a startling precision, honesty, and eloquence that reminds me of everyone I ever grew up with. But a Bly story goes beyond simply the personal level of her characters' lives. "Chuck's Money," for example, the final story in her new collection, is a penetrating analysis of issues of class structure, power politics, and moral crises in Small Town America as they play themselves out in quiet marriages, church carpools, and funeral suppers. Through the eyes of bookkeeper Leona and her oak tree of a husband Allen, we see how the suicide of a teenager sets in motion a series of events that redress old and new injustices. The net result is an exuberant image of people who can be so decent sometimes it takes your breath away.