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Down Along the Piney is John Mort’s fourth short-story collection and winner of the Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction. With settings in Florida, California, Mexico, Chicago, the Texas Panhandle, and, of course, the Ozarks themselves, these thirteen stories portray the unsung, amusing, brutal, forever hopeful lives of ordinary people. Mort chronicles the struggles of "flyover" people who live not just in the Midwest, but anywhere you can find a farm, small town, or river winding through forested hills. Mort, whose earlier stories have appeared in the New Yorker, GQ, and The Chicago Tribune, is the author of the award-winning Vietnam War novel Soldier in Paradise, as well as Goat Boy of the Ozarks and The Illegal. These ironic, unflaggingly honest stories will remind the reader of Jim Harrison, Sherwood Anderson, and Shirley Jackson.
"A new collection by John Mort is always a cause for celebration. Down Along the Piney solidifies his career as one of our most reliable raconteurs of the Ozarks. Anchored in the fictional town of Mountain Vale and the very real Piney River, Mort’s humble and imperfect characters may wander up to Kansas or further south, but the blue-green hills remain in their blood. Mort’s trademark strengths are everywhere in evidence: the confident and fast-paced story-telling, the spot-on dialogue, the sly humor. I’ve always admired how efficiently he enters a story, but this time round it is his graceful exits that impressed. This is a marvelous collection, without an ounce of dross." —Catherine Browder, author of Now We Can All Go Home: Three Novellas in Homage to Chekhov
John Mort's first novel, Soldier in Paradise, won the W. Y. Boyd Award for best military fiction. He has published seven other books, including the story collections Tanks, The Walnut King, and Dont Mean Nothin: Vietnam War Stories. John Mort served in Vietnam with the First Cavalry and afterward attended the University of Iowa, receiving MFA and MLS degrees. He is a member of the Western Writers of America and in 2013 won a Spur Award for his short story, "The Hog Whisperer," included in this volume. He lives in southern Missouri where he raises vegetables and fruit.
1. Pitchblende
2. The Hog Whisperer
3. Mission to Mars
4. Red Rock Valley
5. Home Place
6. Behind Enemy Lines
7. Blackberries
8. The Painter
9. The Truth
10. Take the Man Out and Shoot Him
11. The Book Club
12. Mariposa
13. The Hidden Kingdom