"When I was thirty-five and freshly separated and still a
stouthearted pilgrim to myself, I took a job on the Gulf Coast
swindling people. I sold fake trailer lot deeds to investors with
souls more crooked than my own." This is the voice of Richard, the
winning and irrepressible narrator of this novel in stories. Here,
we follow Richard's chaotic childhood informed by his parents'
passionate and rocky marriage, his mother's nervous breakdowns, his
traveling salesman father's erratic attempts to earn his mother's
love again, and their eventual divorce, through Richard's own
trials with the women in his life. Richard is like a traveler or
pilgrim, moving from Haw River, North Carolina, to Arkansas to the
Texas Gulf Coast and finally back to North Carolina again, as he
and his people -- they drink hard, dance in their kitchens, lie and
cheat -- struggle with their love and wrestle with their often
inharmonious natures. In the end the narrator struggles to
straighten out some small piece of his heart's crooked essence. My
People's Waltz sadly celebrates the decisions we make to get on
with the business of living.
The stories in this collection have appeared in the Atlantic,
GQ, Ploughshares, Best American Short Stories, and New Stories from
the South: The Year's Best. Here's what Dale Ray Phillips has said
of his own work: "Writing a story is a strange act of discovery;
generally, I find that what I have uncovered is nothing more than
what I have always known. Also -- and I'm embarrassed to admit this
-- I love to lie, and fiction offers an acceptable channel for this
compulsion."
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