It's as if Raymond Carver were still alive and living in the Deep South. Or, imagine a world created by Jim Harrison and Cormac McCarthy and plunk it down in the woods of southern Alabama, where emotions run as raw as moonshine. Tom Franklin's eloquent deceptively simple prose evokes a world of hunting and fishing, shotgun shacks and trailer parks, poachers, and lawmen, factory workers, poor white trash, and bucket-o-'blood boozers. His stories are...