The Old and the Lost: Collected Stories(Johns Hopkins: Poetry and Fiction)

The most complete collection of Glenn Blake’s luminous short fiction published to date. “I was born in a land of bayous, raised between rivers,” Glenn Blake writes. “There is a place in Southeast Texas where two rivers meet and become one. There is a long bridge over these waters, and as you drive across, you can look to the south and see where the Old River and the Lost River become the Old and the Lost. You can look out as far as you can see and watch this wide water become the bay.” These fourteen stories are set in the swamps, bayous, and sloughs of Southeast Texas, a region that is subsiding—sinking inches every year. The characters who inhabit Blake’s haunting landscape—awash in their own worlds, adrift in their own lives—struggle to salvage what they can of their hopes and dreams from the encroaching tides.

Table of Contents:
Return Fire Degüello Old River The Bottom Hazard How Far Are We from the Water? Chocolate Bay Westerns When the Gods Want to Punish You Thanksgiving Open Season Marsh Shooting Stars The Old and the Lost

About the Author :
Glenn Blake has taught at Rice University, the University of Houston, and Johns Hopkins University. A senior editor at Boulevard magazine, he is the author of Drowned Moon and Return Fire. His short stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, Boulevard, Southwest Review, The Hopkins Review, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere.

Review :
When he writes about it, you can feel it, smell it, taste it, hear it, see it, that strange, lost, unknown corner of Texas. It is a whole other country and Blake gives it to you with all its oddity and mystery, as it is. —Molly Ivins Reticent, closely guarded, and cryptic, Glenn Blake's terse prose partakes of poetry's careful measures. His stories concern rice fields, houses that disappear into the encroaching high water, and the poignantly named Old and Lost Rivers. He has caught with a peculiar mixture of sadness and humor the personality of this rough, modest, and little-known place. —Rosellen Brown Angulo makes an important contribution to our understanding of the origins and development of for-profit higher education. His attention to the nineteenth-century institution is groundbreaking. —Academe Set in the Old South of Southeast Texas, these tales are spare yet atmospheric, with a profound sense of place. If Raymond Carver and Larry Brown had a love child, the result would be Glenn Blake . . . A writer of tightly constructed short fiction is not dissimilar from an artist who paints miniature portraits. Blake is a master. —Lone Star Literary