Book excerpt: Although Hood is considered a "Southern" writer, her sensibilities are universal. In this impressive collection of short fiction, she uses simple phrases to capture a character perfectly; at the same time, she knows when to unleash her controlled prose, freeing it for poetic evocations of landscapes or moments. Above all, she tells good stories. "After Moore" traces the dissolution of a marriage as told to a marriage counselor by all the family members. Hood manages to be both funny and perceptive as she adopts the voice of each character in turn. The title piece is an ambitious novella in which Hood's experiments with time do not quite work, but she deftly renders a family's complex relationships and at the same time creates the ambience of a mill-town community. Hood, who won the 1984 Flannery O'Connor Award for her first book of stories, How Far She Went, is a talented writer with a distinctive, memorable voice.