No Lie Like Love: Stories

Characters in this debut collection, which earned the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, discover unknown strengths and reservoirs of wisdom after passing through heartache, illness, loneliness and loss. In 11 impeccably crafted, understated stories, Rawlins establishes as his home turf the psyche of the common man, though he expands the category to include a young Afrikaner pondering marriage on a remote South African farm, an HIV-positive teen, a mysteriously ailing college professor seeking a cure in New Mexico and an ex-junkie nursing a heartache in his half-brother's living room. All of Rawlins's characters face their personal demons and an unkind Providence with a flinty, desperate determination. ""Self-pity isn't an altogether useless emotion. It's something to allow yourself when there's nobody else around, an indulgence, a reward for a day's fronted pleasantness,"" muses the dying college professor in ""Kokopelli."" The most resonant pieces are the genuinely affecting ""Big Texas,"" in which a football player recently forced into retirement forges an unlikely but sustaining three-way friendship with his best friend and his best friend's wife, for whom he carries a sizable torch; and ""Home and Family,"" in which a middle-aged man finds he can cope with a recent layoff and divorce in his own dignified, albeit eccentric, manner. Thanks to the author's fine eye for detail and his elegantly plain prose, the stories, even when they fail to gel thematically, are still evocative and memorable. (Dec.)