Nancy Culpepper (2006)

This ''novel in stories,'' Nancy Culpepper, collects the seven tales, many now famous, that Bobbie Ann Mason wrote about Culpepper between 1980 and 2005. Raised on a Kentucky farm, Culpepper moves away, and over the rest of her life tries to manage the divide between her rural Southern parents (who score the book's 100-page-plus anchor story, ''Spence and Lila'') and her life up North. While everyone in the book worries about change (Nancy: ''Nobody they know smokes grass anymore. Now people sit and talk about investments.'' Spence: ''These days, with all the new money, everyone has gone wild.''), the one thing that stays the same is the simple and amazingly subtle way that Mason writes about the interior lives of Kentuckians.