Title: Doors
First published: 1999
Description: The southern landscape that pervades William Hoffman's latest collection of short stories, Doors, is at once familiar and unsettling. Returning to the people and locales that define Hoffman's fiction - ranging from the rednecks and the white-collar elite of Virginia's tobacco country to the families that work its Tidewater shores - Doors is a moving exploration of individuals continually at odds with their circumstances.

Primarily set in Tobaccoton, a fictional town in Virginia, the stories in this collection open doors on a multifaceted humanity, men and women often in search of obsessive identities or ideals - cross-class marriages and romances, adultery within class and outside it, and the inevitable consequences of behavior. At times Hoffman's characters face such challenges with nobility and grace; at other times they run from all hope of ever truly understanding the situations laid before them.

In short, they abide.
Subjects: Social life and customs, Fiction, New York Times reviewed, Fiction, short stories (single author), Virginia, fiction
Places: United States
Time periods: 20th century
LC classification: PS3558.O34638 D66 1999