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When Touch Wood, Joe Ashby Porter's fifth work of fiction, was published in 2002, critics described it as "a challenging but constantly entertaining read" that revealed the Kentucky native's "keen sense of the unusual and ironic in the everyday." In this quirky short story collection, Ashby creates a world that is alternately funny, startling, and intense.
From "The Man Who Wanted to Buy a Cat," an amusing account of a man's obsessive desire for his neighbor's pet, to the title story, "Touch Wood," which traces the influence of a fictional story on fictional lives, these tales—couched in language at once beautiful and strange—charm the reader with their improbable blend of realism and fantasy.
Joe Ashby Porter's first short story collection, The Kentucky Stories, was nominated for a Pulitzer. The son of a Madisonville coal miner, Porter attended Harvard and Berkeley and studied at Oxford on a Fulbright. In his other life, as Professor Joseph A. Porter, he's a widely published Shakespearean scholar who serves on the English faculty at Duke University.
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