The Bear Bryant Funeral Train (Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction)

A displaced young woman contemplates the difference between the madness of a Klan meeting and a mob of escaped asylum inmates. A rancher's son seeks to flee a hardscrabble Texas life via a football scholarship. A cookbook author perfects her latest recipe by giving new meaning to the phrase "made with love." An aging farmer meddles in voodoo. A computer designer plans an elaborate, digitally fabricated hoax. And looming over all is the ghost of Alabama's greatest football coach... This controversial collection, infamously pulped by its initial publisher, is now resurrected. The nine original stories--praised in national reviews--are presented as they were initially intended by the author, and are augmented by one previously unpublished tale. Also included: an introduction by Vice (explaining for the first time his side of the imbroglio surrounding the 2005 hardcover edition), and contextual commentary by other authors and scholars. Ultimately, however, readers will judge this book by its primary powers: the strength and integrity of the storytelling--vibrant, exciting, and, finally, original.