The Old and the Lost

When he writes about it, you can feel it, smell it, taste it, hear it, see it, that strange, lost, unknown corner of Texas. It is a whole other country and Blake gives it to you with all its oddity and mystery, as it is.

Reticent, closely guarded, and cryptic, Glenn Blake's terse prose partakes of poetry's careful measures. His stories concern rice fields, houses that disappear into the encroaching high water, and the poignantly named Old and Lost Rivers. He has caught with a peculiar mixture of sadness and humor the personality of this rough, modest, and little-known place.

Angulo makes an important contribution to our understanding of the origins and development of for-profit higher education. His attention to the nineteenth-century institution is groundbreaking.

Set in the Old South of Southeast Texas, these tales are spare yet atmospheric, with a profound sense of place. If Raymond Carver and Larry Brown had a love child, the result would be Glenn Blake... A writer of tightly constructed short fiction is not dissimilar from an artist who paints miniature portraits. Blake is a master.

Glenn Blake is an eloquent singer of Gulf Coast storms and tides, both meteorological and human. These collected stories are a true delight.