The short fiction of Rachel Maddux, most of it published posthumously in 1992, is difficult to categorize. In part she is a realist, depicting the lives of ordinary people and frequently evoking the texture and atmosphere of American life during the Depression and World War II. In her autobiography, Communication: The Autobiography of Rachel Maddux, and Her Novella, Turnip's Blood (1991), in fact, Maddux recalls her joy at discovering the fiction of Sherwood Anderson: "Those stories about people JUST LIKE THE ONES I KNEW, those very simple stories, where the words coming out of people's mouths sounded just like the words coming out of people's mouths-not going through the author's head first." Yet, just as Anderson's stories are not really simple, so Maddux's stories are suffused with elements of magic, the surreal, and the supernatural, incorporated so matter-of-factly as to seem all of a piece with the experiences of shop...