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    My Father Like a River
    My Father Like a River
    My Father Like a River
    Ebook39 pages33 minutes

    My Father Like a River

    By Ron Rash

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    About this ebook

    Ron Rash, PEN/Faulkner finalist and New York Times bestselling author of Serena and The Cove, has been called "a gorgeous writer" (Richard Price) with a "reputation for writerly miracles" (Janet Maslin, The New York Times), and is been heralded as "one of our very finest novelists" (Richard Russo).

    Now comes an exclusive eSingle featuring a never-before-published short story that shows the lyrical and masterful RonRash at his very best. My Father Like a River transcends the haunting landscape of Rash's native south and explores the complex, powerful relationship between father and family, and the authentic sense of loss one experiences while unemployed—all told in vivid, potent prose.

    Also includes Ron's short story "The Trusty", which was originally published in The New Yorker.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateJan 29, 2013
    ISBN9780062261960
    My Father Like a River
    Author

    Ron Rash

    Ron Rash is the author of the 2009 PEN/Faulkner finalist and New York Times bestseller Serena and Above the Waterfall, in addition to four prizewinning novels, including The Cove, One Foot in Eden, Saints at the River, and The World Made Straight; four collections of poems; and six collections of stories, among them Burning Bright, which won the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and Chemistry and Other Stories, which was a finalist for the 2007 PEN/Faulkner Award. Twice the recipient of the O. Henry Prize, he teaches at Western Carolina University.

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    • 4/5
      This ebook from the library is just two short stories. It turns out to be sort of a mini-advance copy in advance of his new collection coming out in a couple of weeks. Both were excellent stories. Like previous works, he channels the poor, the marginated and the disenfranchised with unsentimental sympathy. I'm looking forward to the real book.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      This ebook from the library is just two short stories. It turns out to be sort of a mini-advance copy in advance of his new collection coming out in a couple of weeks. Both were excellent stories. Like previous works, he channels the poor, the marginated and the disenfranchised with unsentimental sympathy. I'm looking forward to the real book.

      1 person found this helpful

    Book preview

    My Father Like a River - Ron Rash

    My Father Like a River

    Ron Rash

    EccoSolo_Logo_Final.jpg

    Contents

    My Father Like a River

    The Trusty, excerpt from Nothing Gold Can Stay

    Acknowledgments

    About the Author

    Books by Ron Rash

    Copyright

    About the Publisher

    My Father Like a River

    Fifty years, half a century, have passed since the November afternoon my father watched from a sandbar as my brother surfaced and then disappeared in a river that, like my father’s life, was moving in the wrong direction. This was the autumn of 1962. He was thirty-five years old, a man with a wife, four children, and, suddenly, no job.

    I can’t believe he fired me, my father had said a month earlier when he sat down at the dinner table. He sounded puzzled—no bitterness or fear in his voice, not yet. My mother and I, even my nine-year-old younger brother, let our roast beef and mashed potatoes lay untouched. Only the twins in their high chairs continued to eat.

    Maybe he will reconsider, realize the mistake he’s making, my mother said.

    No, my father answered. He’s been setting this up for weeks. I just refused to see it coming. He wants to show he’s in charge, not his daddy-in-law’s ghost, and he’s using me to make that clear. He didn’t even offer me my old job back.

    My father shoved his chair back from the table, his plate untouched.

    I wish Mr. Hamrick had left me in the weave room, he said and walked out the front door.

    Through the dining room window we could see him in the yard, the flare of his lighter as he lit a cigarette. He stood at the edge of the cul-de-sac, looking across the street at houses as new as our own, as heavily mortgaged. Brick houses, unlike the wooden house we’d lived in before, a house on the same mill village street where my father had grown up. There’s nothing more solid than brick, my father had said the day we moved.

    You all need to eat, my mother told my brother and me.

    It’s cold, my brother said.

    Eat it anyway, my mother said sharply.

    A man doesn’t have to have a college degree to wear a tie, Mr. Hamrick had said at the mill’s Christmas party, then announced the third and final promotion that had taken my father from weaver to shift supervisor to management. Hard work and experience are more important than some rolled-up piece of paper.

    Mr. Hamrick had waved us up to the podium to join our father. He had kissed my mother on the cheek

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