The Way People Run: Stories

by Christopher Tilghman

In The Way People Run , one of America's finest writers, the author of Mason's Retreat ("magnificent"--Publishers Weekly) and In a Father's Place ("radiant"--The New York Times), gives us a new collection of stunning short stories, brilliant fiction about the deep emotional connections, and disconnections, between people and within people's inner lives. Against the backdrop of vivid settings, especially the Chesapeake Bay region and the American West, Tilghman writes with passion, generosity, and grace about the ways people con-front themselves and the lives they've created. In The Way People Run , chosen by Robert Stone for the 1992 Best American Short Stories volume, a man goes west to find a new job and, out of the framework of the familiar, loses his hold on his family and his old life. In Something Important , Peter Ramsey undertakes a reunion with his long-lost brother, and discovers that his wife is in love with someone else. In Things Left Undone , chosen by Tobias Wolff to appear in the 1994 Best American Short Stories, a young couple tries to survive a tragedy. As Andre Dubus said about In a Father's Place, Christopher Tilghman "is a spiritual writer who often looks at things the rest of us cannot see." Life's truths are at the heart of these magnificent stories by a modern American master.

Praise for Mason's Retreat

Magnificent...Tilghman's first novel places him securely in the ranks of our most accomplished writers."                          
-- Publishers Weekly

Beautifully written...fully imagined...Few first novels are narrated with the clarity, economy, and masterful assurance Tilghman brings to this re-markably moving and persuasive tale."                    
-- Entertainment Weekly

Rich with character and sweet with the scent of a Maryland farm in America's mid-century summer...The moral center of this novel is larger than all its sorrows, which have about them the inevitable arc of a star falling from a darkening sky."
--Gail Caldwell, The Boston Sunday Globe

Praise for In a Father's Place
A collection that signals the appearance of a gifted new writer."
--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

A simple, classic feel, as if written from deep in the American grain...It is a magnificent portrait."
--Matthew Gilbert, The Boston Globe

About Mason's Retreat

Echoes of The Great Gatsby, William Styron's Lie Down in Darkness, O'Neill, and Faulkner...a stunning individual achievement."                                
--Kirkus Reviews

Mason's Retreat is a brilliant book--full of wisdom and insight into the workings of the soul. The language is perfect. Every paragraph holds a treasure. This is one of the most thoroughly satisfying novels you will ever read."    --Kaye Gibbons

Powerful...a work of surpassing thematic seriousness and fictive artistry. In all respects, Mason's Retreat is exemplary."
--Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories

209 pages, Hardcover

First published April 20, 1999

About the author

Christopher Tilghman is the author of two short-story collections, In a Father’s Place, and The Way People Run, and three novels, The Right-Hand Shore, Mason’s Retreat and Roads of the Heart. Currently the director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Virginia, he and his wife, the writer Caroline Preston, live in Charlottesville, Virginia.

http://us.macmillan.com/author/christ...

Reviews

[Diane Barnes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Six thought provoking short stories from one of my favorite authors. The ongoing theme is about men running from something, mostly themselves. Christopher Tilghman is an excellent writer who deserves to be better known.

[Pamela · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book of six short stories that are well written. They surprised me, as I enjoyed this collection more than I typically do with short story collections. This book is an exception. I am probably being generous with my rating, but in the genre of short story collections for me this one stands out as better than most.

While a few I really wished they were a start of something more, several others were fine leaving off where it ended, they felt complete. The six short story titles are:

• Something Important
• Room for Mistakes
• The Late Night News
• A Suitable Good-bye
• The Way People Run
• Things Left Undone

These all have a male protagonist. Family was a strong theme in these stories, often with the man seeming to be unsettled and not knowing where he fits in his life. He seems to be floundering, struggling in some way.

The subject matter wasn't the cinch with these stories, no, it was the writing style. How well the characters were quickly developed and felt fully formed and relatable in some way, even though I'm not that gender nor in those situations. Seems like I should search out some of Tilghman's longer works.

[Peter B · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of short stories which I almost didn’t read after the first one but kept on and am glad I did. I felt a lot of connection to the stories as most of them concerned a character who was unsure of what he was doing and was searching for something that was unclear to him. There are no great events as plot and no great heroic characters.
A man struggling with mid-life is called by his brother to meet for a weekend and is told that his wife is leaving him. A man goes home to his home ranch after the death of his mother—she has not told him anything about being ill—and decides to stay. I especially liked “A Suitable Goodbye” in which a freelance writer goes with his mother and his young nephew to find his father’s gravesite. His reputation is that he doesn’t ever stick around—always the last to arrive and the first to leave and this trip is no exception. He gets a call that he has to come back to pitch a sales promotion and he needs to go because he is desperate and broke. Did he have to go? Would his life have been better if he had chucked it? Six stories in this book and almost something that could be better the second time around.

[Erich · Rating 5 out of 5]

Astonishingly evocative yet sparse lyric writing on the human condition, in the lives of rural Americans.
Reminds me of James Purdy in his understanding of the way people think, with all the twists and turns that can occur in mere seconds of experience...and which, I suppose, leads inevitably to the way "people run"....

[Linda Brule · Rating 3 out of 5]

THIS IS ANOTHER BOOK OF SHORT STORIES BY THIS AUTHOR THAT I HAVE READ RECENTLY. 6 STORIES, BUT ONLY HALF OF THEM I REALLY LIKED THE OTHERS WERE JUST OK. ANY OF THE FIRST THREE WOULD MAKE A GREAT NOVEL. ALTHOUGH I GAVE HIS PREVIOUS SHORT STORY BOOK 5 STARS THIS ONE ONLY RANKS 3.5 STARS. I STILL LIKE HOW THIS AUTHOR WRITES AND WILL READ OTHER BOOKS BY HOM.

[Jeff Johnston · Rating 3 out of 5]

**3.5**
Short stories about estranged relationships. Worth a read

[Cheryl]

A series of short stories making the reader aware that one's thoughts do not always reflect actions especially when it comes to family members.

[Ian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Christopher Tilghman's second collection of short fiction compares well to his first, In a Father's Place, published nine years earlier. Mining the same territory (geographical and emotional), Tilghman presents husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, sons and daughters in situations that require of them a candid re-evaluation of family relationships that have been fraught or tenuous. Tilghman is masterful at probing beneath the immediate surface of his characters' motives, characters who are occasionally at serious odds with their lot in life, who are searching for a way to fix what is broken or to make a final break. Many of his characters are tentatively exploring the soft edges of a new reality. Some are surprised to find themselves seeking to make peace with a family they left behind for reasons they now find inadequate or mistaken. Landscape plays a huge role in these subtle dramas--Tilghman uses American geography like no one else, giving texture and depth to the lives of people who are in all respects ordinary. Like those collected in his first book, the stories in The Way People Run reward subsequent readings with new revelations about language and what it means to be human.

[Noreen · Rating 5 out of 5]

The stories in this collection are all about people who are dealing with life's issues such as loss, disappointments, passions and family idenity. They are written with compassion without sentimentality.

[Gina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beautiful use of language. Descriptive and flowery. Though I didn't quite get the ending of two of the short stories, I think it is an average read nevertheless. The in-depth message is admirable.

[Melskepko · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful stories, especially the first two