Steve Yates (Morkan's Quarry) offers his first story collection in Some Kinds of Love, winner of the Juniper Prize for Fiction. The 12 stories have Southern settings--seven in Missouri and the Ozarks, including a lovely piece of magic realism, "Mila Joins the Game." Mila Handrill is "possibly the greatest slow-pitch softball player in Lawry City," because he can see just far enough into the future to have a decided advantage in how the game will turn out--until the season's final all-night softball tournament. Suddenly, he sees an orange color pulsating in the east, coming on fast. The team needs him, though, so he bats, with the end of the world rounding third base.
Another Yates story, "Report on Performance Art in One Province of the Empire, Especially in Regard to Three Exhibitions Involving Swine," noted as a distinguished selection in the 2010 Best American Short Stories, is a David Barthleme-meets-George Orwell jaunt. The narrator of "Pleasures of the Neighborhood" is a UPS worker obsessed with insects--and with a married, plus-sized woman named Donna who can't resist him, either. He chronicles their relationship, and her weight gain, with scientific charts and drawings. "A hundred notes my heart sings as the towel drops," he writes. "The sun is fire on my hands and back.... We sweat. We accept.”
Yates surprises often with his range of subjects and moods, with fresh voices and writing styles to complement them all. Some kinds of love and some kinds of work--regular work, job-keeping work--link these generous, thoughtful and inventive tales for the taking. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher