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:
Robert Morgan's fiction is "about people who have a deep sense of themselves, who were not created by a huge and complicated society but by a small, simple one in which individual character sprouted slowly and in trial bloomed... wise, eloquent."
— New York Times Book ReviewRobert Morgan has long been one of this country's finest poets. Now he shows that his hand is just as steady in fiction.
— James WelshMorgan has contributed so much to the health of southern poetry over the last thirty-five years that the southerness of his work is axiomatic... [His] reputation is made, in no small part, on the strength of his ear, with which he has produced some of the most sonorous poems in the language.
— North Carolina Literary Review
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