The Only World You Get: Arkansas Stories

The Only World We've Got collects twelve new and previously published stories, all set in Arkansas. Dennis Vannatta takes us to strange yet strangely familiar places--a funeral home and a search for a genuine Patek Philippe; a field where a sky-blue Cadillac may be buried; an Indian reservation and the remains of a house. The characters we accompany to these haunts become anything but strange, though. Betrayers and betrayed, they are lost, lonely, fearful, hopeful, dangerous, some few even redeemed. They are all us, living in the only world they've been given.

About the Author :
DENNIS VANNATTA lives in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he is retired from three decades in the English Department at The University of Arkansas at Little Rock. He has published stories in many magazines and anthologies, including Chariton Review, Boulevard, Antioch Review, and Pushcart XV. He is a winner of Arkansas' most prestigious and lucrative literary prize, The Porter Prize, which is presented annually to an Arkansas writer who has accomplished a substantial and impressive body of work that merits enhanced recognition. This is his sixth published collection of stories.

Review :
America is an enormous country and it has more than its fair share of extraordinary fiction writers, so it's inevitable that many of them don't receive the readership and acclaim they deserve. Dennis Vannatta is one such writer. He is an absolute master of the colloquial American voice, especially the mid-South variety, and he has an uncanny gift for creating compelling characters who unconsciously reveal their all-too-human flaws. His stories pulse with longing and loss despite the fact that their narrators often attempt to hide their emotions with stoicism, cynicism, and humor. The Only World You Get is a superb collection of stories, and luckily, it's not the only Dennis Vannatta book you can get. I urge you to enter not only the world of this book but also the worlds he maps in his four previous story collections and his novel. If you do, I'm sure you'll add him to your list of your favorite contemporary fiction writers. -David Jauss, Glossolalia: New & Selected Stories Who knows why some books find a place on the shelf of every serious reader, while others, just as powerful and enlightening, do not, but Dennis Vannatta is famous to me. If literary merit and literary success were one and the same, then surely the writer of such quiet masterpieces as Around Centralia Square and Lives of the Artists would be a household name. I turned to this new collection as eagerly as I have to all his others. -Kevin Brockmeier, The Illumination and A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip Dennis Vannatta demonstrates once again his remarkable gifts as a writer of short fiction. His unique and finely-tuned voice expresses the comic-seriousness of everyday experience in an amusing, sad, and poignant way. Like all true artists, he sees the unusual in the usual, the lofty in the lowly, and the marvelous in the mundane. Don't miss him. -Phillip McMath, The Broken Vase (winner of the Worthen Prize for fiction) As intimate as Raymond Carver's stories are, and as wry as Flannery O'Connor's, The Only World You Get: Arkansas Stories has its own unique flavor. In this outstanding collection, Dennis Vannatta reveals the very heart of the American heartland-and it turns out to be a far more complex place than people on the coasts tend to think. Always entertaining and often poignant, this collection confirms what we already knew about Vannatta: that he belongs in the company of Charles Portis and Donald Harington, as one of the truest tale-tellers of The Natural State. -Gary Craig Powell, Stoning the Devil