John Rolfe Gardiner has been writing fiction since the early 1970s. Though he has only begun to gain popular recognition in the 1990s, Gardiner has earned previous critical acclaim for his work. He was a Creative Writing Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts in 1977 and won the three-year Lila Wallace/Reader's Digest Writers Award in 1993. As a Southern writer Gardiner has been unable to escape critical comparisons with William Faulkner. Like Faulkner and other regional writers, he shows an affection for his characters and their faults and has a personal connection with their local culture. His fictional Stilson County, where many of his short stories take place, is grounded in the solid reality of northern Virginia, and in his later work his settings have expanded beyond that geographic range. A reviewer for Publishers Weekly (25 February 1983) observed that "Gardiner is gifted in gently searching out the quirky...