Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"R. M. Kinder may be a modern-day Katherine Anne Porter with a vein of Flannery O’Connor darkness squiggling throughout, but she puts me most in mind of Lucia Berlin in sensibility and droll intelligence. Kinder manages to bolster our hope for humanity, even as she doesn’t flinch from the hard face of twenty-first-century reality. A Common Person and Other Stories is full of heart, generosity, and absolutely stunning writing." —Karen Brennan, author of Monsters
"Reading an R. M. Kinder story is like plunging your face into a clear, cold, spring-fed stream. Everything is changed, refreshed, and revelatory. Her beautiful new collection, A Common Person and Other Stories, is a constant, thrilling reminder of the magic and power that resides in the people—and the animals—that surround us every day." —Whitney Terrell, author of The Good Lieutenant
“Known as a regionalist, a rural writer, and a realist . . . most of [Kinder’s] stories are about the struggles of ordinary people. . . . Some of [the stories] are light, all of them have a serious thread, and every one of them is about working-class, brave people making their life with honor and nobility.” —Sedalia Democrat
"Kinder from everyday life forges sincere, powerful revelations about what goes into being human, sometimes in glory and sometimes in shame, and told always with a genius for emotional honesty that eschews the maudlin in favor of the real." —Richmond News
"The third illuminating collection of short fiction from R.M. Kinder thoughtfully explores how people are shaped by simple heroism and fateful encounters." —Shelf Awareness
“A Common Person is a skillfully touching collection of stories by Missouri writer R. M. Kinder.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"An inherently absorbing, impressively original, and memorably written compendium of short stories by an exceptionally talented author." —Midwest Book Review
"The collection brings out the triumph, violence, and profound ambiguity lurking beneath the surface of everyday life. It is more than worthy of its acclaim and ought to garner scores of readers who may find themselves face to face with their own reflections in its pages." —Missouri Life
"R. M. Kinder’s gift for creating meaningful characters is marked by her awareness of complexities continually at work in every person and by the mysterious alchemies of need, will, and fortune that shape our relationships, including those we share with animals." —Southern Literary Review
"Kinder's range is impressive. The breadth of setting, tonality, and character varies greatly from one story to the next, yet there is a deliberate flatness and matter of fact veneer to these stories that reflect, as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle put it, 'one long effort to escape from the commonplace of existence.'" —OzarksWatch Magazine
Table of Contents1. A Common Person
2. Everyday Sky
3. Tradition
4. Little Garden
5. Signs
6. Alvie and the Rapist
7. Brute
8. A Fragile Life
9. The Bully’s Snake
10. The Dancer’s Son
11. Dating in America
12. Small Courtesies
13. Recovering Integrity
14. A Rising Silence
15. Mother Post
16. Bay at the Moon
17. The Stuff of Ballads
