Choices: Three Novellas(16 Appalachian Writing)

"Annabel Thomas with her heartfelt, supremely wise, and often funny trio of novellas here is my new favorite writer, and I expect it will be a while before anyone comes along to take her place." Donald Ray Pollock, author of The Devil All the Time

About the Author :
Annabel Thomas was born in Columbus, Ohio, and graduated from The Ohio State University. She worked as a reporter and feature writer for The Columbus Citizen, a morning newspaper. She also taught grade school and for many years helped her husband, a veterinarian, treat large and small animals. She has four children. Her parents were born and raised in the Appalachian Mountains of Southeast Ohio, and she returned there each summer so that the mountains and the people had a strong influence on her writing. "Probably because the hill country exists for me largely in their remembrances," she says, "it has turned, in my brain, into myth and symbol, the stuff of which my poems and stories are made. I believe the pull of different cultures resulted in a sort of double vision, a feeling of standing outside my own times, looking on from a distance. I feel this tension at the heart of my fiction." The Phototropic Woman, her first story collection, won the Iowa School of Letters Short Fiction Award in 1981 and was published by University of Iowa Press. A second volume of short fiction, Knucklebones, won the Willa Cather Award in 1994 and was published in 1995 by Helicon Nine Editions in Kansas City, MO. Two novels, Blood Feud (1998) and Stone Man Mountain (2002) were published by University of Tennessee Press.

Review :
"Reading Annabel Thomas is to appreciate a master at the top of her craft. In three novellas, Choices uses the backdrop of rural Ohio to introduce real people wrestling with universal challenges. In 'Dorsey and the Amishman, ' young love is caught in the crosscurrents of cultures that intertwine yet stand distinct and separate. In 'The Lost Book, ' mature love faces physical and mental decline, as well as the demands of mortality itself. In 'Tuesday at the Airport, ' an aging woman searches for meaning in a busy airport. Thomas' writing is a delight. Her characters are full, her touch deft, a single word capturing paragraphs. Her hand on the page is as sure as her characters' hands on the hoe. The earth of her stories is a rich soil, the lines of her telling straight and true, her seeds yielding a bounty." Kurt Landefeld, author of Jack's Memoir Annabel Thomas deftly weaves together three apparently disparate stories into a cohesive tale of humanity with living characters. A young woman's love and lust for a beautiful but seemingly unreachable man, the ebbing sexual life between a geriatric couple whose love remains hopeful, and a lone woman wandering an airport on a fateful day for America, all beautifully coalesce with bits of literature, religion, humor, memory, hope, and passion. Christina Lovin, author of God of Sparrows.