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
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 should be declared a national treasure.
— The Charlotte Observer[Robert Morgan] is a seasoned author whose prose reads like poetry and whose nonfiction reads like novels... His books teach and inspire. He gives the past, with all its heroes and villains, a new life, if not a new purpose.
— Southern Literary Review
Featured works:
Recommended links:
Independent book recommendation service shepherd.com gives readers engaging ways to explore books.
Gap Creek on Shepherd.com