GEORGIA REVIEW FEATURES ABBOTT’S FICTION: Lee K. Abbott’s seventh book of short stories, All Things, All at Once, will be published in spring 2006 by W.W. Norton. I just read “Gravity,” his eighth story to appear in The Georgia Review, and wondered when my first story will appear in TBR, one of the best in the litmag world. Abbott is one of those fiction writers from the Rocky Mountain states that have influenced an entire generation of short story writers, myself included. He grew up in Deming, N.M., that interchange along I-10 where drivers bound for Albuquerque, Denver, and other northbound locales exit for the Hatch cut-off. Abbott’s first book of stories, Strangers in Paradise, has N.M. and other Southwest settings. Its cover shows a wooden sign for “Deming, N.M., pop. 9064” above a bleached cow skull perched on tumbleweeds with the desert stretching out behind to rugged mountains. This sets the scene for the locale and Abbott’s writing, which is energetic and rich with detail. His new story in The Georgia Review concerns a divorced couple in Deming and how they confront the disappearance of their teen daughter. It opens with a killer lede: “They grab her – Tanya, my fourteen-year-old daughter – early in the afternoon from the sidewalk outside the north entrance to J.C. Penney’s at the Mimbres Valley Mall.” Suspense and the mundane mixed together to drag the reader into the story. Ginny, Tanya’s mother, and Lonnie Nees, her father, find out that they didn’t know their daughter. Asked Ginny: “Why didn’t we know, Lonnie? About Tanya?” Lonnie has no answer “except rage.” That leads to a thrilling climax, which solves nothing, as is the case with so many things in life and in parenthood. I recommend you buy the Review and read it your own damn self, as one of Abbott’s characters might say. Or delve into one of Abbott’s collections.

- posted by Michael Shay @ 10:33 AM