His writing is devastating in its beauty, evoking West Virginia’s mountain hollows with a sinewy and precise prose that comes as close to Hemingway as anything I’ve ever read.
Somewhere in the post-Katrina wreckage and disarray of my grandmother’s house, there is a photograph of my brother Joe and me, our arms around each other’s shoulders. We are at a long-gone nightclub in Gulfport, the Terrace Lounge, standing...