Description
Product description
Marvelously funny, bittersweet, and beautifully evocative, the original publication of A Short History of a Small Place announced the arrival of one of our great Southern voices. Although T. R. Pearson's Neely, North Carolina, doesn't appear on any map of the state, it has already earned a secure place on the literary landscape of the South. In this introduction to Neely, the young narrator, Louis Benfield, recounts the tragic last days of Miss Myra Angelique Pettigrew, a local spinster and former town belle who, after years of total seclusion, returns flamboyantly to public view-with her pet monkey, Mr. Britches. Here is a teeming human comedy inhabited by some of the most eccentric and endearing characters ever encountered in literature.
Review
"An absolute stunner . . . In a small place in North Carolina, Pearson has found the stuff of life." ( The Washington Post Book World)
"Anyone from anywhere should feel a fond familiarity with the citizens of Neely." ( The New York Times Book Review)
About the Author
T. R. Pearson is the author of eight novels, including Polar and Blue Ridge, a New York Times Notable Book.
Excerpt:
Daddy
DADDY SAID it was a bedsheet, a fitted bedsheet, and he said she was wearing it up on her shoulders like a cape with two of the corners knotted around her neck. She was standing barefoot on an oak stump, he said, standing on the one nearest the front walk where there was ordinarily a clay pot of geraniums, and he said her hair was mostly braided and bunned up in the back but for some few squirrel-colored strands of it that had worked their way loose and hung kind of wild and scraggly down across her forehead and almost to her nose. She was talking, he said. Then he stopped himself and creased the newspaper twice and put it in his lap, and he changed it to ranting, full-fledged bad-planking-in-the-attic ranting. It was something about Creon, he said, something about Creon and the stink of corpses.
Momma came from out of the kitchen and stood there in the doorway of what Daddy called the sitting room where he had his chair, his magazine hamper and his RCA television, and where Momma kept her drop-leaf maple table which none of us had ever eaten from, not even at Christmas, and which was cluttered up with three shoe boxes, Grandma Yount’s crystal punch bowl, an assortment of odd-sized fliers from the A&P and the Big Apple, and a set of decorative scales that had mysteriously struck a balance between the one pan full of rubber grapes and waxed bananas and the other containing a forty-watt light bulb, eight cents in pennies, and three unrelated buttons. Momma crossed her arms over her apron bib and worked the small of her back against the edge of the doorframe. Daddy drew a Tareyton out of the pack in his shirtpocket and looked straight at me and talked straight at Momma and said, “Madness.”
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So long, and thanks for all the books!
