Imagine the following spoken in a magnolia-scented drawl: "Life is nothing like a box of chocolates. An anthology of Southern fiction, however, is."
In any variety sampler, one can expect only so much variety. The trick is to find the best examples of the classics and the occasional recombination or reinvention that creates a new experience.
And always read the description of contents placed on top of the contents -- the introduction.
This year's guide to the sampler is provided by Z.Z. Packer, a young writer of deserved reputation whose prose conveys the same sharp electricity as her name. Her explanation of the kind of southerner she is (small s) and what the South means to her, to our culture and to the reader, is not only a victorious justification of the whole idea of Southern literature, but a piece of Southern writing that alone is worth the price of "New Stories From the South," (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 448 pages, $14.95).
She excises the paradigm of white capital S Southern characters: "Redneck yeomen whose enormous wads of snuff are rivaled only by the enormity of their goiters ... always going about quoting Faulkner or Aeschylus when they're not tying up unsuspecting passersby."
But it's the small S southern voice Packer has arrayed for us here, a sound both exasperating and gorgeous, that has "given rise to jazz, the blues, zydeco, county and rock and roll -- welling up through the pages of prose" that makes up the better part of Southern writing.
The pieces here come from writers of a New South, a place both like and unlike the old one. In Amina Gaultiers' "The Ease of Living," the South becomes, of all the Gothic, grotesque ironies, a refuge and temporary sanctuary from violence against one very modern young black teenage boy.
The youngsters in this New South are not always so new. The subdivisions and skating rinks are inhabited by the same bright, sensitive and sensible young girls coming to grips with the same adult issues looming just over the horizon. The same well-meaning, sexually inexperienced young boys come of age in the same humid atmosphere of an absent and or sorrowful parent, and the summers are always full of longing and the smell of rainstorms.
The newness of these tales is not in their originality (there's only so much of that to go around in the first place before it becomes merely clever), but in combining the old things in new ways. Packer points out that almost everything awful that happened in America and almost everything beautiful that happened in response happened first in the South. That idea encompasses not just magnolia trees, but the strange fruit they bear. It leaves a scent that lingers after the lid is back on the box.
Emily Carter of Minneapolis is the author of the short-story collection "Glory Goes and Gets Some."
