Nothing Gold Can Stay

Written by Ron Rash

Narrated by William Roberts

Ron Rash has been acclaimed as 'the best American novelist I have come upon in the last twenty years' by The Scotsman. Set deep in the heart of the Appalachian mountains, this new collection of short stories confirms his reputation again and again. Nothing Gold Can Stay transports the reader to another place, and illuminates the world around us in unexpected ways.

• Language: English
• Publisher: W. F. Howes Audio
• Release date: Jan 8, 2013
• ISBN: 9781471242540

Ron Rash

Ron Rash is the author of the 2009 PEN/Faulkner finalist and New York Times bestseller Serena and Above the Waterfall, in addition to four prizewinning novels, including The Cove, One Foot in Eden, Saints at the River, and The World Made Straight; four collections of poems; and six collections of stories, among them Burning Bright, which won the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and Chemistry and Other Stories, which was a finalist for the 2007 PEN/Faulkner Award. Twice the recipient of the O. Henry Prize, he teaches at Western Carolina University.

Reviews for Nothing Gold Can Stay

[msf59 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

“Water has its own archaeology, not a layering but a leveling, and thus is truer to our sense of the past, because what is memory but near and far events spread and smoothed beneath the present's surface.”  As most of my book pals know, I love short fiction, so why has it taken me so long to read the short stories of Mr. Rash? Great question, with absolutely no acceptable answer.Well, I have remedied that oversight and this collection is a knockout, which landed squarely in my wheelhouse. Most of the stories are set in Appalachia, in and around North Carolina, Rash's home state. These tales span, about a 150 years, from the Civil War to the modern era, capturing the dark beauty, restlessness, and violence of those unsettled times. I will now be reading all of his work. Better late than never...

[delphimo_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

In Nothing Gold Can Stay, Ron Rash delivers short stories from after the Civil War to current times in the North Carolina mountains. The stories portray the hardness of life and the many choices that every individual must make in life. The stories portray all different levels of society, but most center on the struggling farmer. The reader sees men with hardened prejudice that only an eye for an eye judgment gives retribution. Ron Rash does not give a clear ending to each story, and the reader can only assume the true course of the ending. Each story vividly describes the people and setting. But as a reader, I am not a fan of the short story which I feel just begins to come to life when the story has ended and leaving the reader stranded in uncertainty.

[dickmanikowski · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Frankly, I had never heard of Ron Rash until hearing an NPR interview a few weeks ago. His fiction, apparently largely centered on the hardscrabble life of the people of Appalachia, sounded interesting.And it is. To my surprise, I realized I had read one of these stories fairly recently, It must have been published in The Atlantic.

[beamis12 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

These stories have such a strong atmosphere of the Appalachians, which is of course whatRash is best noted for. I wasn't sure if his stories would follow the same path of his novels, his brutal honesty in his treatment of his characters and his at times rather violent twists. One has to think when reading these stories, he leaves much out and never sets the reader on a clear path. Some of them do not have definitive endings and it is up to the readers interpretation to figure out what happened or will happen. These are different and though there is some humor I would not say these stories are read for fun, they are read for a great sense of time and place, interesting characters that can alternately be both victim and villain. They are read because Rash is just plain good.

[rvhatha · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A mixed bag: I almost stopped reading after part I--I found that group of stories' ambiguous endings more affected and annoying than artful and haunting. And I worried that This would prove to be Rash's formula, to end all his stories as obliquely as possible. But the structure changed in the latter two parts, and I especially enjoyed the stories in Part III, particularly "The Dowry," "Night Hawks," and "Three a.m. and the Stars Were Out."

[hemlokgang · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I was impressed with this collection of short stories. Rash writes gritty, dark, hopeful and despairing stories. Each tale is distinct from the others. The overall feeling I am left with is intensity. I was drawn to the characters and the deep emotion evoked by each story. A great collection!

[maritimer_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

By and large these stories fit the "going from bad to worse" pattern, with something awful having just happened, or just about to. Many have that eye-rolling, freighted moment when you want to look away, feeling so viscerally that things are about to go irrevocably off the rails. There is a good deal of mean-spiritedness depicted and lots of quiet and not so quiet desperation. A few stories in the book do not fit this mould. Rash's writing is plain and well suited to his themes, though some of the narrative devices feel laboured, like the withheld details and the tricky endings. I appreciated Nothing Gold Can Stay, but having read so many bleak short stories over the years, I now find that I need something more than I found in most of these, something less inert. The one story in this collection that absolutely delivered for me was "A Sort of Miracle", a masterfully tangled knot of insights about American life that is both darkly funny and epically sad.

[jkrnomad · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Brilliant short stories that leave you silent and thoughtful.

[amandanan · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Excellent take on gritty Appalachia.