The lives of the working class in West Virginiaa train engineer, an epileptic, coal miners and outlaws, the fragile and dispossessedare explored in this powerful yet tender collection of six short stories and a novella. They depict an isolated world of hardship, human endurance, and hard-won dignity and are a lyrical rendering of times and places now largely gonebut the stirring clarity of people and landscape can persist in the reader's imagination.