O the Clear Moment

Playful, self-deprecating and wickedly sharp, McClanahan's nine autobiographical short stories delve into youthful shenanigans and poignant first love in the late 1940s in Bracken County, Kentucky. McClanahan has an enormously personable style, ambling back in time to his junior year at Maysville High School in “Great Moments in Sports,” when, mooning about the four Stonebreaker sisters like every other horny goat in town, he experienced his greatest moment of coolness and his greatest humiliation. In “Dog Loves Ellie,” a high-school reunion of his Class of '51 prompts the author to revisit magnificent, painful memories of his first major crush, Ellie Chadwick, who invited the gangly youth to the Sadie Hawkins dance and then dumped him for a less worthy suitor named Dog. “Fondelle, or: The Whore with a Heart of God,” the most sparkling of the collection, chronicles the author's early hitchhiking adventure the summer before his senior year in college. A former Merry Prankster, McClanahan muses on the writing life and classic Americana with giddy nostalgia and gently barbed humor.