My love for the short story format is well-documented. My love for the way Jill McCorkle uses language is well-documented. So to absolutely no one's surprise, I love her latest collection of short stories, Old Crimes.

I describe McCorkle's writing as southern women's fiction and, honestly, I am not entirely sure what I mean by that term but I am sticking with it. Obviously, I prefer genre fiction. But there is something about the way McCorkle writes which sings to my soul. I can't guarantee it will sing to yours in the same way but I do hope that as a reader, you will find those authors who speak straight to your core, bypassing all your thoughts and emotions and expectations. And if you write, I hope you find the readers who read your words, not with their eyes or ears, but with their entire being.

These stories are gritty. They aren't happy but hope is not entirely absent. If I describe them to you, you will wonder why I love them so much. They don't sound like my usual fare. But oh how they capture the essence of life. If certain authors and readers are soulmates, McCorkle is mine. I am grateful her words have enriched my entire adult life. Thank you to the author, Algonquin Books & NetGalley for the eARC.

Another fine example of a collection of short stories that ends up being more work than a novel of similar length, as each story is complete, requiring a reader to pick up and haul every twenty pages or so. There is even some crossover between several of the stories, but using Act III as an example, there are enough characters to fill an entire volume, each clearly defined, and a wish to know more.

Jill McCorkle is a master at crafting stories. Populated with people you know, frailties showing as well as moral compasses. This collection is loosely organized around decisions made and roads not taken that determine the trajectory of a life. But we like the characters despite their regrets. Thanks to Alqonquin Press for always publishing important high quality regional authors and for this advance copy through NetGalley.

I loved this tag line because it really summaries this surprising complex and meaningful book :

Beloved author Jill McCorkle delivers a collection of masterful stories that are as complex as novels—deeply perceptive, funny, and tragic in equal measure—about crimes large and small.

Jill McCorkle is well known as a story teller and in Old Crimes she shares portraits of diverse characters keeping secrets from the world and sometimes themselves. Each story is an emotional tragedy as the characters are unable to connect with the people they most want in their life and unable to surmount obstacles that many times are of their own creation. Touching, harrowing and unforgettable #Algonquin #OldCrimes #JillMccorkle

If you don't know Jill McCorkle, you are in for a treat. She's a North Carolina-based writer with tremendous skill at depicting ordinary people rising above and beyond their small-town settings. Her novels are great fun, but I like the short story collections, each based loosely around a common theme -- Final Vinyl Days, for instance, circled the ebb and flow of popular culture trends, often leaving the characters of her stories high and dry.

Old Crimes is, not surprisingly, about the central kernel of wrong-doing that affects the characters lives. In "The Lineman," the crime is a romantic betrayal that keeps the titular narrator from real intimacy; in "Commandments," a tatted-up millennial schools a group of older wealthy women in how to live a better life by giving up their common hatred for a ne'er-do-well ex. In "Low Tones," a woman's voyeurism combines with her regret for an unkindness that led to the lifelong estrangement of her son, "a plump sweet boy who still slept with a sour-smelling little stuffed owl she bought when he was a baby because it had big. brown wise-looking eyes just like him." [Yes, one is not supposed to quote from a proof copy, but this is just stinking great!]

The stories are clever, nuanced, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, each like a glass of something powerful and delicious.

Thanks to Algonquin Books and NetGalley for the eARC in exchange for my unfettered opinion.