Readers of Bobbie Ann Mason looking for something new won't find it in Midnight Magic; this collection of 17 stories culled from two previous collections, Shiloh and Other Stories and Love Life, is more likely to satisfy fans who can be content with a compendium of greatest hits. Since her debut in the early '80s, Mason has been part of a group of writers from the new South--authors who, though they share the same geography with old masters like William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor, bring an entirely different perspective to it. Gone are the pages-long parenthetical paragraphs of Faulkner; gone are O'Connor's acute renderings of Southern psychology. Mason's characters wouldn't recognize psychology if it rose up and bit them on the keister. This is a world of shopping malls, daytime TV, and unsteady employment, an ethos in which not-so-genteel poverty extends to the imagination as well as the bank account. Brand names and the titles of television shows serve as mile-markers in these stories, and Mason's (often) unemployed heroes and big-haired heroines are only vaguely aware of living lives of quiet desperation. Mason draws these portraits of real life with precision; her accretion of details work hard to bring the reader so deeply into the picture that you can see the crumbs of Wonderbread on the Formica countertops and smell the stale Old Milwaukee on the Sunday morning after Saturday night. Yet as precise and colorful as Mason's images are, in the end they are much like photographs--remarkable in the clarity of what they show, yet only hinting at what goes on in the hearts and minds inside the characters they portray.

The New York Times Book Review, Michael Gorra
I admire Bobbie Ann Mason's craft, her precise eye, the vivid dialogue that stops just short of turning down the road toward local color.

From Kirkus Reviews
``The mystery of writing,'' Mason (Feather Crowns, 1993, etc.) notes in the Introduction to this hefty compilation of her short fiction, ``is much like diving into the darkness in the middle of the night. It's both dangerous and fraught with possibility.'' Repeatedly, Mason's characters, products of the uncertain New South of the 1970s and `80s, either gather up their courage to plunge into change or flee it. In ``Bumblebees,'' for instance, two women largely cut off from the world by grief make a tentative and profoundly moving (if understated) attempt to escape from its confines. By contrast, in ``Memphis,'' a woman increasingly isolated from her family, unable to act, reflects that most of those around her were ``being pulled along by thoughtless impulses and notions, as if their lives were no more than a load of freight hurtling along on the interstate.'' This selection, drawn from Masons two volumes of short fiction (Love Life, 1989; Shiloh and Other Stories, 1982) reminds one of the quiet virtues of her work: her wry, exact portrait of a South caught somewhere between tradition and a bland modern culture of interstates and shopping malls, and her ability to suggest, in the guarded speech of her characters, a world of confusion and hope. Subtle, resonant work. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

A disabled trucker builds his dream house from Lincoln Logs. A woman returns from having a mastectomy to find the flea-market trader she loves imprisoned for selling stolen goods. A recent divorcee fantasizes about time travel as she lies in a tanning booth and wishes for a future "unbounded by time and space or custody arrangements." These are some of the people who inhabit the world of Midnight Magic, a collection of the best short stories by Bobbie Ann Mason. Mason moves quietly through the lives of her Kentucky people, capturing their tangled aspirations and buried disappointments. Men and women struggle with the ironies of modern life in a traditional rural society, trying to cope with fractured families, television evangelism, women's lib, and MTV.

FROM THE CRITICS

Michael Gorra

I admire Bobbie Ann Mason's craft, her precise eye, the vivid dialogue that stops just short of turning down the road toward local color....She can toss off a memorable image...and she has the deftness one needs to capture a situation in a phrase... -- NY Times Book Review

Alice Adams - Alice Adams,Chicago Sun—Times

A gentle touch does not preclude exceptionally sharp observations; in her deft witty and unobtrusive way Mason is amazingly acute.

Anne Tyler - Anne Tyler,The New Republic

Mason is a full—fleged master of the short story￯﾿ﾽher [stories are] a treasure.

Michiko Kakutani - Michiko KakutaniNew York Times

Finely crafted tales that manage to invest inarticulate, small—town lives with dignity and intimations of meaning.

Kirkus Reviews

"The mystery of writing," Mason (Feather Crowns, 1993, etc.) notes in the Introduction to this hefty compilation of her short fiction, "is much like diving into the darkness in the middle of the night. It's both dangerous and fraught with possibility." Repeatedly, Mason's characters, products of the uncertain New South of the 1970s and `80s, either gather up their courage to plunge into change or flee it. In "Bumblebees," for instance, two women largely cut off from the world by grief make a tentative and profoundly moving (if understated) attempt to escape from its confines. By contrast, in "Memphis," a woman increasingly isolated from her family, unable to act, reflects that most of those around her were "being pulled along by thoughtless impulses and notions, as if their lives were no more than a load of freight hurtling along on the interstate." This selection, drawn from Mason's two volumes of short fiction (Love Life, 1989; Shiloh and Other Stories, 1982) reminds one of the quiet virtues of her work: her wry, exact portrait of a South caught somewhere between tradition and a bland modern culture of interstates and shopping malls, and her ability to suggest, in the guarded speech of her characters, a world of confusion and hope. Subtle, resonant work.