The Woods Are Lovely, Dark and Deep and Other Stories

This collection of stories, M.C. Anderson's second book of fiction, portrays life in 1950s and '60s Minnesota, and particularly in its North Woods, with an intimacy that only a native growing up there could capture. With simple but elegant language it paints with words the breath-taking beauty of its setting. And with compelling drama it reveals that culture's mores, social milieu and class conflicts.

The Woods Are Lovely, Dark and Deep, the novella that gives this book its title, focuses on a romance and troubled marriage and the joys and tensions of love. A clan of backwoods poachers and members of two Native American reservations figure in the action. The story's denouement is as surprising as it is horrific.

The six other stories range farther afield.

One is a drama about teenage runaways living in the barn of a down-and-out riding stables. Another explores the innocence of the son of a Lutheran pastor of Norwegian heritage. A third focuses its lens on the social world of the peripatetic set who travel south each winter to train and compete with their retriever dogs. The final two tell of a family's embarrassment with an uncle enamored of Hitler and Naziism, and the depression of a lawyer contemplative in the final stage of his life.