Shiloh and Other Stories

by Bobbie Ann Mason

"These stories will last," said Raymond Carver of Shiloh and Other Stories when it was first published, and almost two decades later this stunning fiction debut and winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award has become a modern American classic. In Shiloh, Bobbie Ann Mason introduces us to her western Kentucky people and the lives they forge for themselves amid the ups and downs of contemporary American life, and she poignantly captures the growing pains of the New South in the lives of her characters as they come to terms with feminism, R-rated movies, and video games.

"Bobbie Ann Mason is one of those rare writers who, by concentrating their attention on a few square miles of native turf, are able to open up new and surprisingly wide worlds for the delighted reader," said Robert Towers in The New York Review of Books .

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Southern, Literature, American, Contemporary, School

256 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1982

About the author

Bobbie Ann Mason has won the PEN/Hemingway Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the American Book Award, and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Her books include In Country and Feather Crowns. She lives in Kentucky.

Reviews

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

This quiet, meditative collection is set in western Kentucky, in the homes of ordinary, working-class people (I liked to believe each story was about a different neighbor).

This is not the book for you if you enjoy a dense plot. Be forewarned: nothing really happens. A couple hundred pages later and I can recall a tree being cut down, dinners being made, cats being fed…like most fiction I enjoy or movies I prefer, what I take with me is the feeling, the loneliness, the futility. This book was a hazy, downtrodden, blur of yearning. Dusks on farms and supermarket checkouts and greyhound buses and TV dinners eaten by the blue flickering light and a soft undercurrent of bored housewives waking from a deep slumber.

They are beautiful. Sorrowful. Understated. And the endings come suddenly and much too quickly. Like life. Things feel incomplete.

[Meg Pokrass · Rating 5 out of 5]

My personal favorite story in this collection is "Offerings," which originally appeared in The New Yorker in the 1980s. "Offerings" is not "flash" but it is very small for a traditional short story length, I am guessing maybe under 3000 words. I can't get over the story's magic, I keep re-readin
g it to comprehend its hypnotic complexity and simplicity (both) its honesty and intuitive sense of how the world leaves us so connected and so alone. The others in this award winning collection (the collection won the PEN/Hemingway Award) have this quality also, the title story "Shiloh" is breathtaking. Jesus, they all are. Some of them are also outrageously funny.

It never stops with this writer's work, her novels and stories. BAM's work bubbles with longing, sly humor, a dangerous amount of tenderness, sadness, and everyday wisdom; She does this the way no other writer does, in such an accessible, intuitive, no-nonsense way, using tiny and sometimes random details which stick in ones mind forever...

Almost everyone whose writing I respect has something similar to say about Bobbie Ann Mason's work. Mostly, when I bring her work up, good writers say to me "She is the one who made me want to write, or think I could write." BAM creates for the reader a lingering, unforgettable ache for the feeling ones of this world.

[Jamie · Rating 4 out of 5]

These were really something. Not too much of a weak one in the lot. My current favorite: Georgeann, the malcontent preacher’s wife, happy with her lousy chickens and playing Space Invaders in the basement. (Sorry, not Space Invaders. The Galaxians. Space Invaders is the better game, says the trucker, because things come at you head-on.)

And then there’s Mary and her dentist in “Residents and Transients,” and Nancy Culpupper twice over, and… and…

How I’d describe these stories, actually: if the gentler Larry Brown (think A Miracle of Catfish; all the Sam parts of Fay) wrote Drive-By Truckers songs.

The incongruities, secrets, and hidden depths in people, here’s a book full of them.

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Normally I don’t pick up a volume of stories to read, but the fact that this is a well known Kentucky author, and I had read some of her other novels, I was compelled to see what was inside. I’m glad I read this book. The stories all have similar themes, and if you read it all at once like I did, the characters and plots can get a little confusing and start to run together. The author writes perfectly using the dialect and slang of country people in Kentucky. All the stories take place in western Kentucky, and familiar places like Paducah, Kentucky Lake, and Murray State University are often mentioned. I loved the characters in these stories because, if you are from Kentucky, most likely you have known people who are just like them in the way that they talk and act. All of the stories have a theme of relationships, and the characters all seemed to be yearning for something
more out of life, although what was not always clear. There is not a clean ending for most of these stories, but it is just like sampling a slice of their everyday lives. This is a nice book to pick up and read when you are on the go and don’t want to be tied down with a long novel.

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was on my list forever, so I decided to go for it. The stories were much sameness, but overall the collection worked together to form a sort impressionistic mood and message--I think the reaction would vary enormously depending on who read it. Funny how such repetitive images and ambiguous characters left me feeling hooked enough to keep on going. This is a collection for people who want to feel vaguely melancholy and lost in thought over things like the passage of time in personal life vs. for the world as a whole. That was my takeaway.

[Nathan · Rating 2 out of 5]

The title story is as good as advertised, but after that I found this collection relentlessly one-note. Almost every story features a vaguely disillusioned heroine, a poorly-developed husband who's not on the scene, and a rural setting sketched with the same tired references to daytime television and hamburger noodle casseroles. It bored me.

[R. · Rating 5 out of 5]

A bit like rays of light pulsed dot-dash-dot from the warmest center of Lorrie Moore's Self-Help received and bent through a prism made of the fragile glass dreams of Raymond Carver's down-and-out husbands, sad-and-fierce wives.

[Marion · Rating 1 out of 5]

I only read the short story Shiloh.
I couldn't really see the point or the purpose of the story... :-/

[Holly · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading these stories; they were interesting and approachable and about deeply human topics - love and history and meaning and knowingness and coming to terms with the fact that our lives are not heroic or impressive and that no one really knows us. One running theme throughout is the tension that inevitably arises between couples. It is as if they are magnets with surfaces that attract and surfaces that push away. These are people who often want to be married but they struggle with how best to know the person they are with, how to make the other happy. In the title story Norma Jean and her husband Leroy have reached a point in their lives where they want different things. He was in a trucking accident and isn't working which bothers Norma Jean; he is no longer the "king" of the house, and Norma Jean has taken up lifting weights. He wants to build a log cabin and he wishes that Norma Jean was more happy that he's now home all the time. He realizes that he doesn't really know his wife and is on the brink of losing her. They both realize that they are not known by the person they have married, which is a lonely realization. Leroy is no longer father nor breadwinner and maybe soon no longer husband...and what remains? Who is he if he is not father/man-of-the-house/husband?

The characters in these stories will have little bursts of independence, of what could be seen as selfishness, only to settle back into their lives and routines although they now have an altered perspective of that life. In an interview in BOMB Mason describes her characters as people who don't read books - they watch TV and talk on the phone; they have the chit-chat banter so common in families where much can be said w/o coming out and saying anything specific. There is a sense that the idea of centered-ness, of knowing what to want and how to get it and how to feel about that thing once you've gotten it, is now missing. In that same BOMB interview the interviewer comments that Mason's characters are on the verge of nothing, which resonates with me.

[Bucket · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a subtle, slow-burn of a collection of short stories. They are all about marriage shifts, drifts and rifts. Most of these couplings (and decouplings) take place in Kentucky in the 1960s and 1970s.

The couples here are mostly falling apart, though some are coming together. There are few seismic changes. For the most part, Mason brilliantly shows the way small things snowball. People change, and change some more and soon they can't see each other anymore. Or people don't change, and tensions build like underwater volcanoes.

There are no losers here, but some favorites: Still Life with Watermelon, The Retreat, Lying Doggo

[J Dubyuh]

3/4ths resolved stories. Each one ends with just enough room for you to have your own opinion about it. Sometimes the writing gets so dry and meandering that it’s easy to go adrift, but ultimately these are rich and provoking quotidian tales of southern people that I love to read. And so consistent across the board! I wouldn’t call any of them fantastic, except maybe Shiloh, but there aren’t any duds, and that is very rare for a sixteen part short story collection!

[Sarah Flynn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mason has a way of being captivating. I found her characters are appealing in their unfathomability. It’s like she lets you in a certain way but then you hit a brick wall and realize you will go no further. That reserve does not make them un likeable. They remain attractive and sympathetic. However, it does create a sense of exclusion. I could feel more and more as the book went on that I just didn’t know those people. It’s funny because I come from a region not far from the one she’s writing about, and a time not much later than when most of those stories take place. And yet- so much of what people did and said in there was not at all familiar to me. Maybe that’s because I felt that a bit even when growing up and spent my life distancing myself from what of that life I had seen around me as a kid.
Anyway, the exclusion left me personally a bit flat. I did enjoy the collection, but it took me a long time to finish and I closed the book feeling a little bit of relief that I wouldn’t have to spend any more time with the aimless way they seemed to just do and accept whatever came their way. And now I’m laughing because maybe that was the whole point. Ahhh the reader life!

[Lynn · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Bobbie Ann Mason is an unusually attractive younger writer whose works have appeared in The New Yorker..." Isn't it strange that the above is the first sentence of the inside book jacket cover for this book? The book won many awards. Do any of Philip Roth's book jackets include statements like "Philip Roth is really handsome"? Strange.

The stories are terrific. I just don't see how writers master the short story and then go on to write multiple great short stories. Bobbie Ann Mason creates funny, poignant, thoughtful stories out of ordinary people and mundane situations. What a great imagination she has, accompanied by an amazing facility with the language.

[Nathalia · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm not a fan of Mason's writing style, nor am I a fan of her choices in subject matter. Her characters felt dull and lifeless, and her writing made it feel as if I was watching a puppet being strung from one paragraph to another.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful writing, such a sense of place and characters in that. The title story turned out to be an old favorite I hadn't seen in a long time and hadn't immediately remembered, but was thrilled to recall, and the others became good friends shortly as well. A great collection overall.

[Tricia Florence · Rating 3 out of 5]

Collection of short stories - Women's view; mostly about breaking up of relationships, takes place in the south.

[Troy Tradup · Rating 5 out of 5]

Possibly — probably — my favorite short story collection ever. When this book first appeared, in 1982, Bobbie Ann Mason’s voice and viewpoint felt so singular and vibrantly odd, I almost wanted to move to Kentucky to see what was going on down there. Except for the complete and absolute American-ness of her characters, Mason might have dropped into American literature from another planet.

Weirdly, I read her short novel, In Country, and found it sort of ‘meh’ (I should probably try it again). And I know I purchased her subsequent story collection, Love Life, but I don’t know that I ever even cracked its spine. It felt like Shiloh and Other Stories was enough all on its own.

Rereading it now, I was pleasantly surprised at how well so many of the stories have held up, and the additional burnish many of them have taken on with an additional forty years (almost) under my belt. The collection feels very much like a novel in many ways, immersive and soul-filling. I felt the same way recently about the movie version of Nomadland, a cinematic and spiritual journey through a lost (or diminishing) America that would be instantly recognizable to any of Mason’s characters.

That theme of loss and diminishment is a strumming through-line here. The lead character in the title story says, “I have this crazy feeling I missed something.” In the very next story, a wife senses her husband is “trying to put together the years of their marriage into a convincing whole and this was as far as he got,” while the husband himself thinks that “having a daughter in college makes him feel he has missed something.” Time and again, Mason’s characters look back at an American Dream that was never quite real for them and think, “I’ve about decided there’s no use trying to hang on to anything. You just lose it all in the end. You might as well just not care.”

But of course they do care. They care about knick-knacks, and home-canned food, and sewing, and TV shows like Charlie’s Angels or Mork & Mindy. They desire, they want, although even they are often not clear what it is they’re seeking. Just ... something.

The women in Shiloh and Other Stories desire most of all, and this almost always mystifies the men in their lives. One man, in his own wedding picture, “seems bewildered, as if he did not know what to expect, marrying a woman who has her eyes fixed on something so far away.” And, back in the title story, Leroy is left behind on the eponymous battlefield while “Norma Jean has reached the bluff, and she is looking out over the Tennessee River. Now she turns toward Leroy and waves her arms. Is she beckoning him? She seems to be doing an exercise for her chest muscles.” In the final story, following a radical mastectomy, Ruby “has learned to extend her right arm and raise it slightly. Next, the doctors have told her, she will gradually reach higher and higher — an idea that thrills her, as though there were something tangible above her to reach for.”

In my favorite story in the collection, “A New Wave Format,” it’s actually a man who suddenly finds himself desiring and reaching for something more. Early on, Edwin “still feels like the same person, unchanged, that he was twenty years ago.” But later, despite the nagging sense that his much younger girlfriend is not right for him (or maybe because of it), Edwin declares, “I was never serious before in my life. I’m just now, at this point in my life — this week — getting to be serious.” Perhaps because this story centers on a man, it ends with an ambiguous but distinctly foreboding hint of violence — another aspect of the crumbling American Dream.

“The twentieth century’s taking all the mysteries out of life,” a character says at one point. I can’t help but wonder how the same character — how any of these characters — would feel about life now that we’ve crossed into the twenty-first.

Fantastic book.

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Continuing my mini tour of Bobbi Ann Mason writing this collection was a must stop. These stories are a great example of portraying a mood, a vibe, a feeling. These characters seem to share more than their rural Kentucky geography. These are what you would call working class folks, farmers, former farmers, lumberyard workers and K Mart checkout clerks.

Not much happens, other than life. But life, really, is what happens between the events we point to later. These characters have these in spades. I’m not going to review individual stories per my normal. These stories permeate a general feeling of malaise, small town introspection

Each time I read a Mason story I feel like I am visiting my long gone parents lives from a time I’m not old enough to remember. These people are high school graduates, perhaps a semester or two of college before life put a stop to that. What is most significant to me as a reader forty years later is how old these characters are at a young age. A woman is fifty two and dreaming of a senior citizen home. A wife is 42 and talks about all three of her girls being grown and married.

This is the life cycle my parents grew up with and lived. I’m older than these people and would never call myself old. It’s not like I am afraid of being old, I’m not, but I do t feel it, so defeated, so just hanging on.

These are at this time perhaps a bit outdated to some modern readers but I guarantee you these people exist in great numbers. Understanding how you can be a grandmother at 36, and feel old at 49 might do well to understand some of those people many people on the coasts cannot comprehend.

A small note. The folks in rural Kentucky must be NBC folks because it seems almost any reference to television shows all trace back to NBC in the early eighties. From “ Real People “ to Little House on the Prairie “ to Jane Pauley era “ Today” and the “ Tomorrow “ show. One reference is made to “ The Waltons “ but all else in NBC. Interesting oddity if nothing else.

[Drew F. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bobbie Ann Mason's collection of short fiction is an honest look at the Baby Boomer generation from the female perspective. Almost all of these stories are set in rural western Kentucky during the 1970s and early 1980s. Each piece involves members of the working class trying to understand and come to grips with their places in a changing, broken world. Farm communities and economies are in decline. Traditional family values, even those rooted in the conservative American South, are being transformed by children whose formative years were spent in the 1960s. Relationships are disintegrating as women, through moments of self-discovery, are finding themselves unhappy with the initial life they were born into or married into. Disease, especially cancer, is a formidable foe. There is also an ever-present educational disconnect as many of the females featured in Mason's tales realize further study is needed to improve their situations and break away from the working class moniker.

Amidst all this strife, Mason gives us an accurate portrayal of these characters from the South. The dialect is spot-on, as are the interactions between multiple generations within the same family. One cannot miss the overabundance of females with two first names (including the author herself)! Mason pays great attention to detail in her descriptions of such things as the interiors of southern homes, the sewing process, and multiple references to Coke and Mork and Mindy. Her observations are keen and her humor is dry within these slices of life. Her portrayal of men is not very flattering, but it's not intended to be. The males are merely sideshows to help propel the female protagonists of her stories toward some kind of realization. Mason never preaches and sometimes leaves her characters in a form of stasis. After all, not all events are life-altering! Overall, I enjoyed Mason's stories and style. However, I won't miss the cats!

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Many of the stories are set in present tense, which is used to great effect, displaying the pervasive layering of past and future over our waking lives. We live among ghosts, which we either ignore or hold close, and fear the phantoms to come. Old: family, animals, farms, antiques, marriages, children, grandparents. New: televisions, vegetarians, gamma rays, truck drivers, model kits, separations, independence. Love continually falling apart and coming together again. Love backed up by reasons, right or wrong. The promise of change, ironically, never changes. Old or young, change is unavoidable. Changes within, changes without. Leaving and coming back. Fixate on the past or ignore it: you'll learn something either way. At an average length of 17 pages, each story offers beautiful language and ambiguous events. The dialogue and scenarios are realistic, and the inclusion of contemporary objects feels natural and significant. These are stories to revisit and reread with care and attention, like old friends.

Every story is good but my faves were: Detroit Skyline, 1949; The Retreat; Nancy Culpepper+Lying Doggo; Graveyard Day; The Climber; Drawing Names

"Georgeanne runs upstairs to the desk and gets change for a dollar. She puts another quarter in the machine and begins firing. She likes the sound of the firing and the siren wail of the dividing formation. The hardest thing is controlling the left and right movements of her rocket ship with her left hand as she tries to aim or to dodge the formation. The aliens keep returning and she keeps on firing and firing until she goes through all her quarters."

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read "Shiloh and Other Stories" by Bobbie Ann Mason years ago; just completed reading it the second time for a program in our local library. I know I enjoyed the second reading more than the first. Ms. Mason captures the voices of my family and friends during my younger years, giving their dreams and wishes a voice I didn't capture or understand the first time around. The stories are all different in location and characters but carry a theme of how our parents and grandparents looked at everyday life and how they managed to survive the sameness of chores and lifestyles that were expected during the 1950s and 1960s. I particularly enjoyed "The Ocean" with the couple driving their new RV to see the Atlantic Ocean for the first time. Some lines were very poignant, others made me laugh out loud! Remember those long trips on vacation and parents would pull off the highway and moms would spread peanut butter and jelly on warm bread? Camping at night while moms cooked supper in the RVs or over a campfire? The still-continued ritual in some parts of the south of "Decoration Day" or "Graveyard Day"? "Graveyard Day" was another favorite in this collection.

Although this collection was published back in 1982, the stories are from an earlier day and remind us of how much we've changed but, more importantly sometimes, how much we've stayed the same. I enjoyed this little volume and look forward to reading more of Ms. Mason's works. These are "comfortable" reads, no gore, no huge thrills, but a relaxing journey about how many of us lived while growing up.

[Edward Champion · Rating 2 out of 5]

I remain completely baffled why this largely awful collection of pointless banality won the coveted PEN/Hemingway Award. Yes, I'm determined to read all the winners. And, yes, I'm realizing just how low the bar was back in the 1980s. Because Bobbie Ann Mason has one storytelling move, and one storytelling move only: present the most generic characters imaginable, with stock non-narrative situations (going to the flea market, going for a walk) and dropping endless pop culture references (Real People, Star Trek, Galaxian). I mean, when Stephen King does this, he's already established a character. But Mason's characters are paper-thin husks. She sometimes starts off a promising idea, such as with "The Climber," in which an astronaut compares walking on the moon with finding Jesus. But she fumbles almost every time in execution. There was, however, one story I liked -- "Residents and Transients" -- that is unlike the other fifteen duds involving a married woman's affair with a dentist. Little details such as the dentist bringing ice cream to her (so that she might see him in the dentist's chair) suggests that Mason has SOME capacity for storytelling. But you know what? One Mason volume is enough for me. I was so underwhelmed by this collection that unless someone who I highly trust makes a fifteen minute stump speech for Bobbie Ann Mason, I have no plans to read this dopey bobblehead again.

[Bobbi Woods · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am so overdue on reviewing this book—I read it weeks ago and life got in the way. Mason wrote this book in the early 1980s and the only reason I picked it up was the author has the same name as I do. Silly, right?

This book of short stories was VERY well written but each story had a similar theme—women living in western Kentucky (or from western Kentucky as in two of the stories) who were restless and unhappy in their marriages. “Mork & Mindy” was mentioned several times as a popular show. It was very strange—I didn’t have to read the whole book to get a good taste of how well Bobbie Ann Mason writes, though. I just wish the stories had a bit more variety. So the writing was a 4 but the story “plots” were more like 3s. I am going to shy away from short story collections for a while.

[Joshua · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hard to judge fairly - the 3/5 rating is what I give it as a collection to sit down and read through. It took me a long time to whittle away at this one, doing a story here or there between other reads, because it got samey. This book feels more than anything like an artifact of the passing of no-fault divorce. I did not double check but I believe it might be every single entry in the collection that deals heavily with it as a theme. It gets exhausting to learn a new set of names and characters for the same general thematic space over and over again.

But when read as stand alone works, each story is obviously written by a master of the craft and deserved 4 or 5 stars as its own thing. I recommend the writer and the stories, but maybe not this way of collecting them.

[Piet · Rating 4 out of 5]

Verhalen die me hebben geraakt. Ze spelen alle in Kentucky en brengen mannen en vrouwen in beeld die ondanks tegenslagen of beperkte mogelijkheden zich door het leven ploeteren. Het zijn net kleine documentaires. Een vrouw schildert alleen maar meloenen en hoopt dat een verzamelaar ze zal kopen, een man rijdt dagelijks de bus die gehandicapten van en naar school brent, een vrouw die een borstamputatie heeft ondergaan hoort dat haar pas verworven vriend in de gevangenis zit. De personen hebben vaak te maken met armoede en hebben vaak weinig bestendige relaties. Rafelige levens die door Mason met liefde en precisie worden opgetekend. En: altijd met een open eind. Fantastisch!

[Frank · Rating 5 out of 5]

I must have read this in 1994 or 1995 or so, and I remember never having heard of her before and then being very pleasantly surprised, liking these stories a lot. Enough for me to buy one or two also buy her collection Love Life at least, since that's also on my shelf.

And having just now, almost 30 years on, reread the opening story I don't think I've changed my opinion. It's simply a very well done short story. Typical New Yorker story, maybe, in so far as they can be ‘typical’. Anyway, I know I probably won't be disappointed if I take this or Love Life of the shelf again to give it a reread.

[Zane Hesting · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a book. Offers so much on marriage, loss, day to day living, longing, and the ambivalence we all feel about moving on while being rooted in place. That place is western Kentucky, a country where Mason's characters pick up random hobbies, lovers, have day dreams about trips down to Shiloh or the ocean, prepare for the loss of a dog, cook mindlessly, and attempt to confide with those that have known us the longest. These stories are stripped of everything trendy and modern and only look for the synchronicity of communication with whatever it is we have left. I was shook by what these stories grabbed at.

[Grayson Cassels · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bobbie Ann Mason is a writer of my heart. I think I’ll give this book to my grandfather whenever I come back to South Carolina. It is sweetest to me because of the folks who call dinner supper and how easily I can imagine my grandmother or even parents in these situations, their voices, just a notch turns change from a Kentucky accent. My favorite was Residents and Transients, a woman having an affair with her dentist and trouble moving culturally and physically with her northern husband and from her Kentucky home. Each story is meditative, slow, and none end with a neat bow but rather a shallow section of the river to notice the stones beneath.

[Laurel Schulert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Each story was well-written with wonderful characterization, but the plots sometimes left me a little unsatisfied in terms of overall meaning. When read back to back, the stories really seem to explore the same themes: unhappily partnered couples, women exploring their independence (whether happily or unhappily), and the clash of old fashioned life with the modern life of the 1980s. These stories perfectly depict their era and setting, serving as "still life" or "slice of life" representations of Kentucky at the point in time in which they were written.

[Duane Gosser · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well, I can't say that I enjoyed this collection much at all. Not sure how old, or where in her life Bobbie Ann was when most of these were written but good Lord every married woman in Western KY can't be as miserable as this bunch. To be fair there were a couple of happier wives/girlfriends but in general this was a horribly depression group of stories to read. Bobbie Ann is a gifted writer but unless you want to wallow in sadness, pass this one by for sure.