The people and terrain of rural western Kentucky figure prominently in the fiction of Bobbie Ann Mason, a highly regarded novelist and short story writer. Herself a native Kentuckian, Mason has chronicled the changes wrought in her region by the introduction of such phenomena as television, shopping malls, popular music, and fast-food restaurants. Her characters often stand perplexed at the junction between traditionalism and modernity, between permanence and transience, between their own deep-seated need for individual expression and their obligations to family and home. As Meredith Sue Willis noted in the Washington Post Book World, Mason "has a reputation as a regional writer, but what she is really writing about is the numerous Americans whose dreams and goals have been uplifted and distorted by popular culture." According to David Quammen in the New York Times Book Review, "Loss and deprivation, the disappointment of pathetically modest hopes, are the...