Drowned Boy By Jerry Gabriel Book

Jerry Gabriel delivers an unsentimental portrait of rural America in Drowned Boy, a collection of linked stories that reveals a world of brutality, beauty, and danger in the forgotten landscape of small-town basketball tournaments and family reunions. In Boys Industrial School, two brothers track an escaped juvenile convict, while in the title novella, a young man and woman embark on a haphazard journey to find meaning in the death of a high-school classmate. Selected by Andrea Barrett for the 2008 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, these stories probe the fraught cusp of adulthood, the frustrations of escape and difference, and the emotional territory of disappointment—set in the hardscrabble borderlands where Appalachia meets the Midwest.