Available May 2003

Fiction

$25.00t, Hardback

128 pages, 51/2 x 81/2

978-0-86554-814-5, H617

The touching, humorous stories of a Kentucky childhood

James Perkins

With the frankness of a memoir, each story in Snakes, Butterbeans, and the Discovery of Electricity explores the reaches of innocence amid a Kentucky childhood. Simply, plainly, directly, the narratives construct Four-eyes’s young world as he navigates a deeply Southern, deeply real existence as a boy in the 1940s. In “The Homecoming,” Four-eyes’s uncle has returned from World War II a quiet and shaken man, a casualty unlike any the young boy expected. Four-eyes and Billy discover that the distance between imagination and reality can be disappointing in the story “Gangbusters.” In “Fireworks,” the allure of pranks fades as the boys learn the costs of cruelty. On a dare, Four-eyes enters the house of the mysterious midgets at the end of the alley behind his house and finds much more than he bargains in “Four-eyes and the Midgets.”

Nolstalgic, funny, and touching, this collection reminds us of the forgotten paths and pitfalls of childhood. In the fashion of the truest Southern storytellers, Perkins, in Snakes, Butterbeans, and the Discovery of Electricity asks us in, invites us to stay awhile, and to listen.

James A. Perkins is a professor and chair of the department of English and Public Relations at Westminster College (New Wilmington PA). He holds degrees from Centre College, Miami University, and the University of Tennessee. In addition to his fiction and scholarly writing, Perkins is a poet. He taught creative writing for twenty years and now teaches textual criticism and public relations research courses. Perkins and his wife Jane have two grown sons, James and Jeffrey, and two grandsons, Rory and Joshua.

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Titles of related interest

Generations: Stories

Discovering the World: Thirteen Stories

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