My Lord Bag of Rice

Author's Bio:

Carol Bly is the author of several books, including The Passionate, Accurate Story and Changing the Bully Who Rules the World, both available from Milkweed Editions. She teaches ethics at the University of Minnesota and lives in Minneapolis and Sturgeon Lake, Minnesota. Tobias Wolff, author of The Night in Question and This Boy's Life, teaches at Stanford University.

Quotes:

“Carol Bly is a master storyteller and fiction writer. Her brilliance, ethical sense, and artristry reach a pinnacle of polish in the two new stories in her marvelous collection, My Lord Bag of Rice, which could have been subtitled, 'The Best of Bly.'”—Abigail Davis, Bloomsbury Review

“At the rural crossroads of Women's Fiction and American Noir, Carol Bly has staked her territory. Clear but unexpectedly dark, Bly's writing is as unusual as it is accessible. . . . Sly examinations of domestic and emotional upset.”—Newsday

“What was it—what is it—that I like so much in Carol Bly's stories? Their art, first and last, the sure way she has with this exacting form. . . . Her stories are as particular in their settings and culture as those of Turgenev and Joyce and Flannery O'Connor, and as far from being simply regional.”—Tobias Wolff, from the introduction

“Bly has a gift for making flawed, spirited people endearing, and many of her characters are heroic because they've become heros to themselves.”—Publishers Weekly

“Bly goes to the core of human nature in a way that is quiet and efficient and dead sure. And also surprising.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“What makes these stories so appealing is that, as Bly says, she puts 'people before weather and props.' . . . She spends her words developing her characters fully into people the reader cares about.”—Utne Reader

“Months after reading these passages, I find that Bly's characters continue to live out their complicated lives in my mind. I remain interested in the moral questions that irritate, befuddle, and inspire them.”—Progressive