Midnight Magic: Selected Stories

A disabled trucker builds his dream house from Lincoln Logs. 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 a few of the people who inhabit the world of Midnigt Magic, a collection of Bobbie Ann Mason’s best short fiction, featuring “Shiloh.” In her signature style, Mason moves quietly through the lives of her Kentucky characters, capturing their tangeld 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. With an introduction by the author especially written for this new volume, this timeless collection chronicles the perplexed lives of contemporary people as they confront our everchanging society. As one character wryly puts it, “Nobody knows anything. The answers are always changing.”