The Road From Prosperity: Stories

by Nancy Welch

The twelve stories in Nancy Welch’s debut collection describe a post-1970s industrial blue collar landscape in which families face joblessness, transience, and an increasingly tenuous foothold on the lower rungs of the middle class. The daughters and sons, fathers and wives in these stories set in small-town Ohio are bounced out of the American dream by layoffs, shutdowns, and the uncertainty of steady work and steadfast love.

Genres: Short Stories

256 pages, Hardcover

First published June 2, 2005

Reviews

[Lara · Rating 5 out of 5]

I finished this collection of short stories and immediately wanted to start again at the beginning, just to get another chance to examine the workings of these meticulously constructed little machines. How did Welch make her characters sound so real? How did she manage to make each story's narrative voice so different from the rest?

Woe to the reader who might glance at the surface of these stories and pronounce them "just" about girlhood or parenthood or love. A vein of darkness runs through this book, and it's a vein of cold, hard truth.

Gosh I hope she's working on a novel.