Uplands: Selected Stories
As with his novels, many of Robert Morgan’s short stories let characters, often women, tell their own stories. Morgan’s earliest publications were short stories, and over six decades he has continued to produce short fiction, along with novels, poetry, essays, and biographies. He has said the short narrative is the most challenging genre, requiring the concision and precision of a poem with the drama and implied character insights of longer fiction. These stories reflect the distinctive features of his poetry, vivid, lyrical, evoking a particular place.
Morgan has found the culture and land of the southern Appalachians especially suited to expression in poetry and short fiction, the beauty of the ridges and valleys, the unique history, the laconic speech of the people, intense bonds of family and community, the storytelling gifts, and long memories. Gathered from five previous volumes of short fiction, Uplands proves greater in impact than the sum of its individual pieces.
Published by:
Jesse Stuart Foundation (Hardcover 2025)
Uplands: Selected Stories at Jesse Stuart Foundation
Included stories:
Judaculla Rock
Survey
The Tracks of Chief de Soto
Devil's Courthouse
Watershed
Poinsett's Bridge
Pisgah
1916 Flood
Death Crown
The Wonderful City
Murals
The Cliff
A Brightness New & Welcoming
Tailgunner
The Balm of Gilead Tree
The Distant Blue Hills
Praise for Robert Morgan:
Gripping storytelling, indelible sense of time and place... Morgan turns the stories of prosaic lives into page-turners.
— The Raleigh News and ObserverRobert Morgan's poems are always exciting for their precise knowledge of country things, and of how things go in the world of natural fact and process. This new collection gives us also some delightful lore from the Southern mountains: we learn of the horse fiddle, and holy cussing, and the intrepid pastor who held off bear or panther with his umbrella.
— Richard Wilbur, former U.S. Poet LaureateOne of Robert Morgan's chief claims on our attention is the backbone he puts into the backcountry lore that grounds his work, the stately proprieties and meditative gravity he hews out of the hardscrabble folkways of his native Blue Ridge Mountains... His is a fine-grained, self-implicating intelligence that can span the intricacies of both pine resin and pantoums.
— Poetry
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