World Made Straight

(Paperback, Media tie-in)

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Description

Summer in Madison County. Seventeen-year-old Travis Shelton cannot see a way out of his small town-until he discovers a grove of marijuana in the woods that could make him some serious money. But Travis has stumbled across more than drugs. His discovery is the first unwitting step in a journey back to the savage violence and betrayal festering in the community's past, and to the corruption in its present. Vivid and unsettling, The World Made Straight is a powerful exploration of the secrets that bind us together and drive us apart.

Reviews

'An intellectually satisfying work of suspense ... [The World Made Straight] reminds us of the sort of compelling literature a brave artist can fashion from the shards of such experience.' Los Angeles Times Book Review [Ron Rash's] novels are complex and compelling, told in graceful, conscientious prose, and The World Made Straight is his finest yet.' Charlotte Observer 'Ron Rash writes some of the most memorable novels of this young century ... No writer since the late Larry Brown has handled the raw grit of country people as truthfully as Rash... At once uplifting, harrowing, and unforgettable.' News & Observer on The World Made Straight '[The World Made Straight] is the third novel by Ron Rash that has brought my life to a grinding halt-but to praise Rash simply as a powerful storyteller would be to overlook his gifts as a profoundly ethical writer and, at the same time, a poet with a fine and tender eye for the beauty of nature. What I love and admire most of all about this book, however, is its fierce confrontation of a human dilemma that has sparked too many of the world's most violent tragedies: the burning question of just how much allegiance we owe family and community, including the ghosts from our past.' Julia Glass, author of Three Junes 'The World Made Straight is a wonderful, heartbreaking, heart-healing kind of work, a work of genius-genius and insight and poetry and the kind of language that whispers to me like music coming back off dense wet hills and upturned faces.' Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina 'The Cove is a marvelous novel, bristling with power, humanity and the exceptional quality of characterization and story-telling we have come to expect from Ron Rash' Irvine Welsh 'Set during World War I, The Cove is a novel that speaks intimately to today's politics. Beautifully written, tough, raw, uncompromising, entirely new. Ron Rash is a writer's writer who writes for others' Colum McCann 'Rash writes in the tradition of William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor and more contemporary writers such as Charles Frazier and Cormac McCarthy. His fiction occupies that strange, language-driven netherland between myth and realism. It's a dark, poetic, blood-soaked world.' Australian "Ron Rash's Burning Bright is a volume of spare, finely tuned short stories that take us deep into the soul of the American highlands...this volume of stories consolidates Rash's reputation as an American master at the height of his powers.' Age 'Powerful, violent and compelling, Serena has the grace of a literary masterpiece, a read to be savoured page after page. The language is cool, clear and compelling; dialogue and atmospherics as sharp as the Appalachian mountain air.' Courier Mail 'Get as far as the opening page of Ron Rash's Serena and you won't be able to put it down...His writing is beautifully evocative and his sense of place and time captivating...utterly chilling and gripping reading. Ron Rash has a bestseller on his hands.' Sunday Telegraph 'Rash's stories are firmly located in time and place but have a universalism that transcends both.' Otago Daily Times 'Woven through the narrative, bloody strands of violence run down through the generations from the Shelton Laurel massacre of 1863 to the savage battle fought by the small-town drug lords of today.' North & South

Author Bio

Ron Rash has long been a critically acclaimed writer, but his 2010 novel Serena catapulted him to new heights, garnering rave reviews and becoming a New York Times bestseller. A PEN/Faulkner finalist for Serena, Rash is also a recipient of the O. Henry Prize and winner of the 2011 Frank O'Connor Award for Burning Bright, a collection of short stories. His other work includes the novels One Foot in Eden and The Cove and another short story collection, Nothing Gold Can Stay. Ron Rash teaches at Western Carolina University and lives in the Appalachian Mountains, South Carolina. His most recent novel is The World Made Straight.