Hitting the Charts

Description

According to Russell Banks, North Carolina ex-pat Leon Rookes work charts what the short story form can and cannot do, for he works out there in the terra incognita mapping limits.Hitting the Charts, a nineteen story Best-Of compilation, offers stories as free from constraint as a Monk solo, and as disquieting and resonant as a southern Baptist preacher at a big-tent revival. Dancing is not forbidden.The theatrical quality of Rookes stories, combined with his merciless attention to form, presents the reader with a corrective to plot-driven, stale prose.Danforth ReviewHe is the high-priest of maximalist panache, the standard-bearer for a hyper-rhetoric that is at once strange, eccentric, and beautiful.Douglas GloverHe can break your heart in half all at once, like a kindly assassin, or chop it to bits with a dozen swift, sure strokes. Hes a writer with a black belt in portraying the small daily tragedies that break bones and leave no visible wounds. Its when hes funny, which he often is, that hes most dangerous.Russel Banks