A displaced young woman contemplates the difference between the madness of a Klan meeting and a mob of escaped asylum inmates. A rancher's son seeks to flee a hardscrabble Texas life via a football scholarship. A cookbook author perfects her latest recipe by giving new meaning to the phrase "made with love." An aging farmer meddles in voodoo. A computer designer plans an elaborate, digitally fabricated hoax. And looming over all is the ghost of Alabama's greatest football coach... This controversial collection, infamously pulped by its initial publisher, is now resurrected. The nine original stories--praised in national reviews--are presented as they were initially intended by the author, and are augmented by one previously unpublished tale. Also included: an introduction by Vice (explaining for the first time his side of the imbroglio surrounding the 2005 hardcover edition), and contextual commentary by other authors and scholars. Ultimately, however, readers will judge this book by its primary powers: the strength and integrity of the storytelling--vibrant, exciting, and, finally, original. "In a razor-sharp style studded with sparkling metaphors, Vice introduces a gallery of unhappy, embattled, or just plain ornery Southern souls. Impressively varied ... worthy of Erskine Caldwell in his heyday. Distinguished and disturbing work, from a lavishly gifted new writer." --Kirkus (starred review) "Vice does not owe his success to the work of other writers. He is a storyteller of imagination and resourcefulness, and a craftsman of considerable poise." --C. Michael Curtis, fiction editor for the Atlantic Monthly "While The Bear Bryant Funeral Train is deeply informed by the South in which it is set, this is fiction that looks beyond clear regional boundaries--beyond the legendary football coach of the book's title and the Klan rally of its most controversial story--to a larger world of Khrushchev, the Black Plague, the Great Depression. Far from forming an insular perspective of the South, it is a picture of the South as part of a broader history." --Michelle Richmond in The Oxford American Brad Vice's writing has appeared in the Georgia Review, the Atlantic Monthly, the Southern Review, Best New American Voices, New Stories from the South, and Stories from the Blue Moon Cafe, Volume III. Born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Vice now divides his time between Starkville, Mississippi, and Pilsen in the Czech Republic. Used Book in Good Condition