Dry Well, Reviews

Praise for
The Dry Well
by Marlin Barton

"Touching issues of poverty, prejudice, infidelity, and incest, Barton writes with grace and compassion. Each story is an epiphany, presenting a gestalt of events that leads the characters to reinterpret their entire lives in a single moment."
—Booklist

"A real talent. Highly recommended."
—Barry Hannah, author of High Lonesome

"The Dry Well is simply wonderful. Marlin Barton is a writer to watch."
—Melinda Haynes, author of Mother of Pearl

"I have read with admiration Marlin Barton’s stories in magazines for years. It is exciting to now have them collected in The Dry Well. The stories are so exact in their sense of place and time, phrase and voice, they disturb and delight, and make the past as alive as the present. The stories are celebrations, connecting us with the living, and with those who have come before us. Marlin Barton is one of the most distinctive new voices in Southern fiction."
—Robert Morgan, author of Gap Creek

"Told beautifully in a voice that is both languorous and acute but always in service to story and
to the little-visited places in the heart, and with a feeling for character and place and time so rare it has become nearly endangered, the stories in The Dry Well linger and deserve to last."
—Janet Peery, author of The River Beyond the World

"Marlin Barton’s short-story collection reveals him to be a subtle student of literature and humanity and a writer worth watching. . . . He has managed to create his own spot on the map and peoples it with compelling characters."
—John Sledge, Mobile Register

"Readers like me, who have been enjoying Marlin Barton’s work in journals for the past several years, will be awfully pleased to see The Dry Well. These are not vaguely defined ‘fictions’; they are instead fully realized stories in which the characters are as alive as the folks next door. This collection is something special—the first book by a writer you’re going to be hearing of for many years to come."
—Steve Yarbrough, author of The Oxygen Man