She portrays the disquieted lives of men and women not blessed with much money or education or luck, but cursed with enough sensitivity and imagination to suffer regrets." The essayist for the
St. James Guide to Young Adult Writers explained that "Mason portrays people's search for individual identity in times of social and personal transition."
Mason's first volume of fiction, Shiloh and Other Stories, established her reputation as a rising voice in Southern literature. Novelist Anne Tyler, for one, hailed her in the New Republic as "a full-fledged master of the short story." Most of the sixteen works in Shiloh originally appeared in the New Yorker, Atlantic, or other national magazines, a fact surprising to several critics who, like Anatole Broyard in the New York Times Book Review, labeled Mason's work "a regional literature that describes people and places almost unimaginably different from ourselves and the big cities in which we live." Explained Quammen: "Miss Mason writes almost exclusively about working-class and farm people coping with their muted frustrations in western Kentucky (south of Paducah, not far from Kentucky Lake, if that helps you), and the gap to be bridged empathically between her readership and her characters [is] therefore formidable.
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