Tim Gautreaux was forty-nine years old and had been honing his craft for almost two decades when his first book of fiction was published in 1996. The acclaim for his character-driven narratives about Louisiana blue-collar workers wrestling with moral dilemmas was immediate, as reviewers from The Arkansas Gazette to Commonweal and Kirkus Reviews compared his talent to that of Flannery O'Connor. Over the next four years, Gautreaux delivered on the promise of that debut performance by publishing a novel and a second short-story collection to equally strong reviews. Though he objects to being labeled a "Cajun" or "Southern" writer, insisting that his themes are universal and that he just writes about the environment he knows best, Gautreaux continues to demonstrate that the Southern literary hallmarks of regionalism, storytelling, and concern with moral issues are timeless in their appeal and are capable of reinvigorating the postmodern novel and short story...