Why I Lie: Stories

Why I Lie tells the painful and hilarious story of a down-home Arkansas boy's efforts to make good. Jack Smith, the protagonist of this story cycle, is an unwilling ne'er-do-well, from ""people who ate roadkill, whose hearts got broken early on and stayed that way,"" for whom ""being poor was a way of thinking, a mindset you couldn't outrun with a suitcase full of money."" The ten stories in this powerful collection trace Jack's ongoing attempts to outrun the violence and tragedy of his past and create a viable life - despite a native state that often traps its rural poor. The road to Jack's future self is as convoluted as a Delta bayou and as colorful as an Ozarks's autumn. He inhabits an uneasy world where memories of the integration of Central High in Little Rock are still raw, and blacks and whites regard one another with suspicion and bitterness; where family ties bind tightly, no matter how difficult to love one's family it may be; where a meal of freshly fried fish and hushpuppies and sliced tomatoes, washed down with ice-cold beer, constitutes one of life's greatest pleasures; and where fate is never generous to the poor. Rich in insight into the human condition and fraught with the shimmering power of Gills's unique voice and perception, these ten linked stories reveal Jack's capacity for sympathy and his capacity - all of ours - to go crooked. Gills has sipped at the fountain of magical realism, and one can see in his stories the influence of those Southern masters from Faulkner through Fred Chappell and Lewis Nordan. But the Arkansas folk he depicts are his own, as is the hard-scrabble, chaotic world they inhabit. Gills is a talent to be watched, and these engaging stories will move their readers.