F*ckface

March 15, 2020
The complexities of life in a changing Appalachia link the 12 stories in Hampton's impressive debut collection. In the title story, a closeted grocery store cashier named Pretty is stuck in her small-minded mountain town. "This place is a long way from Asheville--eighty miles, and a lot of churches in between." Her only support is friend and co-worker Jamie, who "didn't care that [she] liked girls." But when Jamie quits her job to move to Asheville with her boyfriend, a devastated Pretty finds an unexpected new ally. In the brutally painful "Devil," Tech. Sgt. Boggs had enlisted in the military to escape his Cumberland, Kentucky, home, but he discovers the past is never really past when he reluctantly spends the night with his fundamentalist parents before shipping out to Afghanistan. As Carolyn and Frank, the twin protagonists of the poignant "Frogs," embark on an evening nature walk at a mountaintop research station run by a local university, Carolyn plaintively asks her brother, "Are we rednecks?" Without the right clothes or equipment for the hike, the siblings stand out as locals, and Carolyn is further humiliated by the naturalist guide's condescension. "He's not even from here," she angrily notes. The demeaning attitude of outsiders toward Appalachian people is highlighted even more notably in the dazzling "Sparkle" when a visit to Dollywood shatters a woman's romantic illusions about her husband's scientific research partner. In writing about an often misunderstood region, Hampton could easily have succumbed to the romanticism of Lee Smith or the negative stereotypes of J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, but she avoids these tendencies with cleareyed honesty, humor, and compassion. A marvelous introduction to a fresh Southern voice.

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April 15, 2020
In this gripping collection of short stories, writer and college instructor Hampton brings the complex people and sweeping landscapes of the Blue Ridge mountains to life. The stories mostly follow women, as they experience perimenopause; endure cancer scares stemming from tenure at a chemical plant decades prior; stoke extramarital affairs; and all try to make sense of their place in Appalachia in the twenty-first century. One story (a male-centric outlier) chronicles a park ranger's choice to retire after discovering too many dead bodies while on the clock. Another memorable piece focuses on the complicated sexuality of a woman who was raped in high school by a man who later married her sister. A third snaps a quick but vivid portrait of a young woman home for her grandmother's funeral, feeling out of place and discombobulated while describing her work at a hog farm that recently burned down, all of the animals cooked alive inside. Hampton writes with awe and admiration of the scenery of Kentucky and North Carolina, and with radical empathy for its inhabitants.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

June 1, 2020
Hampton looks at modern life in post-industrial Appalachia in her sharp debut collection. In “Fuckface,” Pretty, a lesbian who is just shy of 21, lives in a trailer with her dad and works as a supermarket cashier in poverty-stricken Robbinsville, N.C., a town lacking in resources to address problems such as a dead bear in the market’s parking lot. Pretty, meanwhile, is afraid she’ll never be able to escape her town while her crush makes frequent trips to Asheville. In “Frogs,” twins Frank and Carolyn sign up for an ecology class led by a renowned naturalist. Carolyn’s fitful quest for self-improvement (she gives their brochure the “same frown she had given her smudged canvas in the painting class”) is botched after she feels slighted by the instructor. In “Mingo,” amateur photographer Tina struggles to convince her husband of the cost of strip mining on West Virginia’s natural habitat and to stop his accident-prone, elderly father from driving, while feeling her emotions and body enter a repeated phase of “hollowing out.” Hampton’s penetrating descriptions do a remarkable job of evoking a region where nature is dying off and tourism and mining boom and bust while the locals ponder their existence. These approachable, thought-provoking tales offer a range of insights on the characters’s complicated relationships to their environment.