Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower
I bought this book because I had read Wells Towers in McSweeney's, New Yorkers 20 under 40 and ESPN magazine the fiction issue and his stories stood out among the best in each collection. I was pleasantly surprised that this book comprised of 10 stories were all new to me as I assumed that at least Raw Water would have been included. Overall I really liked the collection, the stories deal with a lot of the standard issues of literary fiction, family, love, loneliness, pains of childhood, etc. Well's style is full of excellently written prose that pulls out quotes from every story. His other fairly consistent style is to let a story end without any conclusion or finality. I personally like the technique if it's done well but it was kind of funny as I was talking to my girlfriend and she said that it's the exact reason why she doesn't like short stories so he might be a little polarizing as an author. My favorite story in the collection is the title story Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. It's a story about a Vikings who leaves his wife to sail across the sea to a neighboring village to stop a sorcerer but really it's an excuse to pillage. It was a fun way to end the book.
