[To say that Mason] is a "new" writer is to give entirely the wrong impression, for there is nothing unformed or merely promising about her. She is a full-fledged master of the short story, and Shiloh and Other Stories, her first collection, is a treasure. Her characters are backwoods Kentuckians, for the most part, and they're so vividly and lovingly portrayed that we feel we know everything about them. We know their food: the potato and mushroom-soup casseroles, uncooked fruitcake mad...

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 al...

Each story [in Shiloh] … is a recreation of life, in all its quaint, baffling, funny, pathetic inconsequentiality, in one small, obscure corner of the world. Few of her English readers will ever have visited the towns that she describes, few are likely to do so. But it is probable that they will retain the impression that they have made a visit, in some other existence or in a dream, so intense is her evocation…. One of Miss Mason's constant themes is the manner in which, with no decisi...

To me, the small-town Kentucky people of Bobbie Ann Mason's are stranger and more remote than the inhabitants of any French, Italian or Spanish village. I think it's because many of the men and women in "Shiloh and Other Stories" seem to improvise their styles of being, while the people in European towns are more likely to begin with, refer to, or depart from a recognizable tradition. Miss Mason's people live in the spaces cleared or emptied by the movement of American lif...

[Shiloh and Other Stories] has been treated to a remarkable amount of favorable critical attention for a first collection, and indeed [Mason's] appeal is undeniable. The first lines pull you in with an easy, quirky rhythm: "The former astronaut claims that walking on the moon was nothing, compared to walking with Jesus." Every story is rich with surface details, little pleasures and pains captured absolutely, of the everyday life of future shock in the provinces. Mason has really heard ...

Vision and technique come exhilaratingly together in Bobbie Ann Mason's collection of stories [Shiloh and Other Stories]. She is one of those rare writers who, by concentrating their attention on a few square miles of native turf, are able to open up new and surprisingly wide worlds for the delighted reader. Less tragically gloomy than Raymond Carver, Mason nonetheless resembles that fine writer in the way she lays bare the heart of a domestic drama; and like him she holds up for our inspection a who...