Ron Rash’s “In the Valley” Returns to the Villainess Who Propelled Serena to National Acclaim
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In this episode 209, guest host and award-winning author Heather Bell Adams interviews Ron Rash, aptly called by The New York Times “one of the great American authors at work today.” His latest book is “In The Valley, ” named a Garden & Gun and Atlanta Journal Constitution best book of the year and Winner of the 2020 Thomas Robinson Prize for Southern Literature.
“In the Valley” is a collection of ten searing stories and the return of the villainess who propelled Serena to national acclaim, in a long-awaited novella. Two of the stories have already been singled out for accolades: “Baptism” was chosen by Roxane Gay for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories 2018, and “Neighbors” was selected by Jonathan Lethem for The Best American Mystery Stories 2019.
Ron Rash has long been a revered presence in the landscape of American letters. A virtuosic novelist, poet, and story writer, he evokes the beauty and brutality of the land, the relentless tension between past and present, and the unquenchable human desire to be a little bit better than circumstances would seem to allow (to paraphrase Faulkner).
Connect With the Author
About the Author:
RON RASH is the author of the 2009 PEN/Faulkner finalist and New York Times bestseller Serena and Above the Waterfall, in addition to four prizewinning novels, including The Cove, One Foot in Eden, Saints at the River, and The World Made Straight; four collections of poems; and six collections of stories, among them Burning Bright, which won the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and Chemistry and Other Stories, which was a finalist for the 2007 PEN/Faulkner Award. Twice the recipient of the O. Henry Prize, he teaches at Western Carolina University.
About Guest Host Heather Bell Adams
Heather Bell Adams is the author of the novels, Maranatha Road (West Virginia University Press 2017) and The Good Luck Stone (Haywire Books 2020). She is a recipient of the Rose Post Creative Nonfiction Award, Carrie McCray Literary Award, and James Still Fiction Prize. Her short fiction appears in The Thomas Wolfe Review, Atticus Review, The Petigru Review, Broad River Review, Pembroke Magazine, and other journals. Heather lives in Raleigh where she works as a lawyer.
Listen to her episode on Charlotte Readers Podcast about The Good Luck Stone, HERE.
About the book In The Valley
In these ten stories, Rash spins a haunting allegory of the times we live in–rampant capitalism, the severing of ties to the natural world in the relentless hunt for profit, the destruction of body and soul with pills meant to mute our pain–and yet within this world he illuminates acts of extraordinary decency and heroism.
Two of the stories have already been singled out for accolades: “Baptism” was chosen by Roxane Gay for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories 2018, and “Neighbors” was selected by Jonathan Lethem for The Best American Mystery Stories 2019.
And in revisiting Serena Pemberton, Rash updates his bestselling parable of greed run amok as his deliciously vindictive heroine returns to the North Carolina wilderness she left scarred and desecrated to make one final effort to kill the child that threatens all she has accomplished.
Praise for In the Valley
“Lady Macbeth in Appalachia, and other tales by an American master. . . Mesmerizing. . . ‘In the Valley’ takes Serena to such a fever pitch of destruction that in a lesser writer’s hands it might seem overheated. But Rash maintains the deep keel that has always distinguished him. . . He’s one of the best living American writers, and his laconic understatement is much more powerful than excess. . . Haunting and darkly funny.”
— Janet Maslin, The New York Times
“The Blue-Collar Bard. . . [Rash] distill[s] his prose into taut, muscular portraits of mountain life. . . Every poem, every story, [is] an attempt to honor the beautiful, troubled, often contradictory and violent world of Southern Appalachia without blurring its edges. . . [His work] explore[s] the ways in which rural Appalachia has been both shaped and destroyed by people at war with the land, and in some cases, at war with one another: the flooding of mountain valleys, the battle over wild rivers, the slow creep of the drug economy into desperate communities. The conflict between humans and their environment is not a regional concern, and [these are] not ‘Southern’ stories; they [are] American stories that [happen] to occur in the South.”
— Garden & Gun
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