Small Town Tales
Sidney Hall, Jr.
These vivid sketches of small-town America in another era and of Mr. Hall's eccentric and marvelous family have been collected from his popular newspaper column, "A Brookline Boyhood." They are so rooted in place and time that they uncannily evoke the reader's own past. Award-winning southern novelist and poet Fred Chappell calls this a "wonderfully enjoyable book of reminiscences and speculations. Small Town Tales preserves memories the way happy farmwives preserve peaches and strawberries. The results are equally wholesome and delicious. Sidney Hall's work is a rare treat!"
"Sidney Hall, Jr. is one of those thoughtful, intimate writers you become friends with instantly. His wonderful Small Town Tales remembers the Sixties, not as the turbulent decade that got into the history books, but as a time of gentle wonder for a boy coming of age in what already seems - change coming so fast now - a vanished paradise."
-W.D. Wetherell"Sidney Hall, Jr. proves that real family values transcend the political cliche. Small Town Tales is . . . a genuine record of a fine way to raise children, be a family, live a life. It's nostalgia with a twist."
-Rebecca Rule"... [a] deeply moving account of growing up...Hall's philosophical, multi-layered insights transcend geography. They have a universal appeal."
-Jack Barnes, Columnist"Funny stories...by a poet of some distinction."
-Geoffrey Elan, Yankee Magazine"A door on childhood."
-Ralph Jimenez, Boston Sunday Globe"In his book, Small Town Tales, A Brookline Boyhood, Hall has created a memorial to childhood and small town living in general, and to his father in specific. . . a touching paean on the poignancy of life, death, and the ethereal essences that survive even as we become adults...
The book is as light or as heavy as you want it to be. Hall's prose is poetic and complex, yet makes for easy reading. You could pick up one of these three-page essays a day, or sit down and read the whole book in less than two hours."
-Christine Halvorson, The Monadnock Ledger (Read full review)
About the Author
was born in 1951 and has lived most of his life in southern New Hampshire. He is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Reed College, where he studied Greek and Latin Classics. He has been a publisher, editor, columnist, Latin teacher and active conservationist. He has visited and taught creative writing classes in elementary schools, high schools and colleges.
He is the author of two book of poems, What We Will Give Each Other, and Chebeague, and a collection of his newspaper columns, Small Town Tales. His poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals and his book reviews and poetry have appeared in the Los Angeles Times Book Review.
184 pp, Paperback
ISBN 0-9636413-3-6 / Price $12.95
16 Photos
