For several years short stories by Bobbie Ann Mason have been turning up—rather improbably, it seemed—in The New Yorker and The Atlantic. The improbability lay in the fact that 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 was therefore formidable. But formidable also is Miss Mason's talent, and her craftsmanship. "Shiloh and Other Stories," her first collection, shows not only how good she can be but how consistently good she remains. The most improbable thing about this volume is that not a single page lags, hardly a paragraph fails, not one among 16 stories is less than impressive….
Loss and deprivation, the disappointment of pathetically modest hopes, are the themes Bobbie Ann Mason works and reworks. 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 allow them to suffer regrets. These are lives seen against an equally disquieted social landscape, where old grocery stores with front porches are being replaced by things called "the Convenient," where the grown daughters of ranch wives work as clerks at K Mart, where higher wisdom comes in via the Phil Donahue show….
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