Melanie Rae Thon has established a reputation for writing tough and lyrical portraits of those who live on the fringes of American society. Girls in the Grass (1991) and First, Body (1997), her two volumes of short stories, have been praised by reviewers for their powerful lyric visions, compelling characters, and blues-styled rhythms. Working in both first- and third-person voices, Thon creates such vivid portraits of her characters that, as Geri Gourley wrote in The Bergen Record (16 February 1997), "You feel their torment in the urgent pace of her narratives." Rand Richards Cooper wrote in The New York Times (16 February 1997) that Thon's range of marginal and miserable voices makes her "more American" than many of her writing peers.

Thon's short stories share many of the thematic and stylistic elements that appear in her novels Meteors in August (1990) and Iona Moon (1993). Of these shared elements, the strongest is the reliance on lyric...