University of Massachusetts Press Some Kinds of Love: Stories (Juniper Prize for Fiction)

About the Author Steve Yates is the author of the novel Morkan's Quarry. His short stories have appeared in many journals, including Missouri Review, Southwest Review, and TriQuarterly. A graduate of the MFA program at the University of Arkansas, USA he is assistant director/marketing director at the University Press of Mississippi. Product Description Sometimes the opposite of love is not hate, but depravity. In these twelve stories set in the Missouri Ozarks, New Orleans, and Mississippi, Steve Yates reveals lovers clawing back from precipices of destructiveness, obsessiveness, cruelty, vanity, or greed. They seek escape and yet find new barriers, realizing true love may not be at all what they imagined. Pioneers, limestone quarry owners, young German American Civil War survivors, bankers, sex toy catalog designers, highway engineers, Pakistani terrorists, attorneys, missile guidance masterminds, and furniture factory workers (who can see the future) populate these pieces. From the Ozarks of the 1830s, when locals perceive doomsday in a historic starfall, to the near future at an all-night slow-pitch softball tournament when Armageddon looms yet again, these stories chart the dark side of love, the ties that bind families, and the sweet complications of human desire. Review It seems as though short stories are a dying art, replaced by a never-ending stream of flash fiction, so it's refreshing to see a collection with hardly a piece shy of five thousand words, especially when they are as expertly crafted as the dozen stories comprising Some Kinds of Love.Yates works comfortably with period material having researched the era thoroughly, but also restraining himself from a deluge of details, sharing only a handful of the pertinent but telling details to make the setting genuine. This is true of all his period pieces, of which there are several in this collection.Yates's strength as a writer is in his eye for detail and his ability to create believable, likeable characters. He slips into different time periods and personality types that would be very difficult for a lesser writer to pull off; but he's also capable of handling some tough material. Yates's collection is a refreshing alternative to the pop-culture referencing, seemingly assembly line produced flash-fiction and short fiction being pumped out these days. Yates crafts well-rounded characters whose interests aren't simply those of a twenty-something college kid, as opposed to so much that's out there. Yates's stories focus on the Ozarks and Southern life, but he avoids cliche and familiar scenarios, breathing new life into these locales. I enjoyed this collection and look forward to reading more of Yates's work.--CL Bledsoe, author of Riceland: Poems, Naming the Animals: Collected Stories and Last Stand in Zombietown"