Dimestore

In her first work of nonfiction, Lee Smith deploys the wit, wisdom, and graceful prose for which she is beloved to conjure her early days in the small coal town of Grundy, Virginia—and beyond. For the inimitable Lee Smith, place is paramount. For forty-five years, her fiction has lived and breathed with the rhythms and people of the Appalachian South. But never before has she written her own story. Set deep in the rugged Appalachian Mountains, the Grundy of Lee Smith's youth was a place of coal miners, mountain music, and her daddy's dimestore. It was in that dimestore—listening to customers and inventing life histories for the store's dolls—that she began to learn the craft of storytelling. Even though she adored Grundy, Lee Smith was being raised to leave it. Her formal education and travels took her far from Virginia, though her Appalachian upbringing never left her. Dimestore's fifteen essays are crushingly honest, always...