Hard Toward Home

by C.D. Albin

Hard Toward Home is alive with cross-grained people caught between their pasts and futures and striving to outlast the harm they've done each other and themselves. Albin possesses all the storyteller's gifts of eye and ear and mind and goes them one better by virtue of his heart. These stories are deep and wise and quietly gorgeous. -Janet Peery, author of The River Beyond the World

156 pages, Paperback

Published May 3, 2016

Reviews

[Joy Reinbold · Rating 5 out of 5]

Albin's story collection is full of heart. The place, the Ozark region, is a character that looms large over each story. This is an excellent example of place-based fiction.

[Joe Bruno · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had left the Fire Department just before I went to a writer's workshop in Fredericktown in January 2016. C.D. Albin was the host of the workshop. There might have been a dozen people there, and only one person had brought a piece for the group to critique. I don't remember much about the workshop other than I thought the submission was absolutely terrible and that C.D. Albin was a kind and knowledgeable person. I bought a copy of "Hard Toward Home," and he signed it for me. I remember talking with him and when he found out I had been a firefighter he talked about Larry Brown and how he would see him around Oxford when he was at Ole Miss. We exchanged emails and he graciously read some of my efforts and gave encouraging comments.

I read the collection then and don't recall what I thought. Since that time I finished my undergraduate in English and have done 3 years of focused reading and have written quite a bit. This reading I greatly appreciate his writing. His stories are complete and clearly written and convey strong emotion. I will say this collection is one of melancholy and broken relationships, but the work is very clean and I don't think there is a misplaced word in the volume.

Now having attempted to write myself I recognize the effort included here, and the skill. This is a very good collection of stories contemporarily set in the Ozarks. I like that he has kept to a specific area and has not strayed in time. I can recommend this to any reader of literary fiction and I am passing it on to a member of my writing group. I am also sending C.D. Albin an email thanking him for writing this collection.

[Michelle Hannon · Rating 5 out of 5]

This little book’s ten short stories are all set in northern Arkansas which gives it a sense of place. They are beautiful, insightful stories about relationships between family and friends, the trials of growing up and growing old, and the frustrations and disappointments that life dishes out and how we grapple with them. I love the efficiency of short stories. How they can say so much in just a few pages. These don’t disappoint. This was C.D.’s first book, and it received the 2017 Missouri Author Award in Fiction from the Missouri Library Association.

[Clifford · Rating 5 out of 5]

I came across this collection on my bookshelves recently and was in the mood to read some short stories. (Also, I took a close look at the cover by Dawn Surratt, which I love.) These are fine stories, set in Arkansas and featuring a variety of interesting characters--they're described on the back cover as "cross-grained people"--who are working to get by, coping with whatever means they have.

[Phillip Howerton · Rating 5 out of 5]

As this excellent collection demonstrates, life as it is lived in the Ozarks is much broader and many-splendored that the trite and popular renditions delivered by the numerous drugs-and-violence novels that exploit and colonize the culture of this region. This collection is some of the finest fiction ever produced about rural life in the Ozarks.

[Paulette Guerin · Rating 5 out of 5]

These short stories at times took my breath away. Exquisite writing and characters so developed I still imagine them living their lives. A complex portrait of Ozarks life.