The lives of the working class in West Virginia -- a train engineer, an epileptic, coal miners and outlaws, the fragile and dispossessed -- are explored in this powerful yet tender collection of six short stories and a novella. They depict an isolated world of hardship, human endurance, and hard-won dignity and are a lyrical rendering of times and places now largely gone - but the stirring clarity of people and landscape can persist in the reader's imagination.