Poachers: Stories

New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1999. CG3 - A first edition (stated with complete numberline) hardcover book SIGNED by Tom Franklin and inscribed to Otto (Otto Penzler) on the title page in very good condition in very good dust jacket. Dust jacket has some wrinkling on edges, dust jacket and book have some bumped corners, wrinkling on the spine edges, light discoloration and shelf wear. Includes laid in stapled booklet POACHERS uncorrected proof (46 pages and also SIGNED by Tom Franklin and inscribed to Otto (Otto Penzler) on the title page) and three(3) photos of the author. The world of Poachers is dark, brutal, without redemption, a place most of us have never seen. But Tom Franklin takes us there without batting an eye. One of the book's central motifs is Alaska, which flickers as a faraway symbol of escape and purity. But be warned: Few of these poachers will get out of Alabama alive. Although not marked in any way, this copy comes from the personal collection of Otto Penzler, legendary editor and founder of the Mysterious Press, an award-winning icon in the genre. 8.5"x5.75", 192 pages. Satisfaction Guaranteed. An astonishing debut collection, Poachers reads as if Raymond Carver were still alive and living in the profoundly Deep South. With eloquent, deceptively simple prose, Tom Franklin writes about hunting and fishing, poachers and drunks, factory workers and poor white trash. These are men who react, often violently, against a dying world whose gravity they can't escape. In polluted swamps and contaminated rivers, in leaky gas stations and smoky industrial plants, the people who inhabit these stories are all poachers. In the title novella (selected for inclusion in both New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, 1999 and Best American Mystery Stories, 1999), three half-wild brothers kill anything that crosses them, including a rookie lawman, which brings back into the swamp Alabama's mythic Frank David, a game warden as mysterious and deadly as the river these men haunt. In "Grit," an unlucky plant foreman and his bookie run a phantom night shift in a slag factory, making black market sandblasting grit and heading for a deadly confrontation. And in "The Ballad of Duane Juarez," the destitute, alcoholic narrator lives off the scraps of his brother and his brother's rich wife, sinking to nearly unimaginable depths. Influenced by the author's experiences as a hunter and his years as a blue-collar worker, Poachers reveals a south Alabama yielding its forests, bogs and rivers to lumber mills, power plants and chemical factories. The necessary mystery of the woods - trees, creeks, ridges and hollows - is being replaced by the iron and steel of pipe and tank, drum and pump. The state itself is being poached. And, as the weathered, hand-painted sign in the title novella reads, JESUS IS NOT COMING. . Signed by Author. First Edition. Hardcover. Very Good/Very Good. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall.