Music for Hard Times — Clint Mccown

The only two-time winner of the American Fiction Prize, Clint McCown offers up his first collection of short stories. Music for Hard Times is indeed the music we need for these (or any) hard times, says David Jauss. The words 'master storyteller' appear in a great many hyperbolic blurbs these days, but Clint McCown is one of the few writers who genuinely deserves that description. Like Mark Twain and Flannery O'Connor, he writes stories that are consistently moving, wise, and funny-the literary equivalent of a trifecta. And also like those masters, he writes pitch-perfect prose that somehow manages to be simultaneously colloquial and lyrical.