The Best Seats in the House: And Other Stories — Keith Lee Morris

The men who inhabit these stories live in precarious normalcy, balancing dashed dreams with an uncertain progress into maturity, small-town realities with their largely unfulfilled hopes. It is due to Keith Morris' remarkable gift to give such eloquent voices to his characters that we cherish them and believe completely in the bewildering complexities that lie just beneath the placid surface of their yearning, workday lives. In these stories, a failed high-school athlete watches as his gifted son falls under the spell of his charismatic grandfather, and a young man in the process of losing his sight struggles to accept his developing blindness while clinging to his diminishing independence. Morris explores the painful tensions of parental love and “old-fashioned” virtues like respect, thoughtfulness, empathy, and understanding. Morris is a writer of enormous skill, and these stories of small-town men groping for a perspective on themselves and the lives they've come to live are among the most powerful in contemporary fiction.