FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. - Dramatically compelling and historically informed, the stories in acclaimed author Pat Carr’s latest collection, The Death of a Confederate Colonel, published by the University of Arkansas Press (paperback, $14.95), will debut at 7 p.m. Saturday, March 31, at a reading and book signing at Nightbird Books. Her tales take us into the lives of those left behind during the Civil War.

These stories, all with Arkansas settings, are filled with the trauma of the killing, the dying and the horrendous wounds of the war. They tell of a Confederate woman’s care of and growing affection for a wounded Union soldier, a plantation mistress’s singular love for a sick slave child, and an eight-year-old girl’s fight for survival against frigid cold, injury, starvation, heartbreak and lawlessness.

Here are women showing what they’re made of as they hold down the home front with heroism and loyalty, or, sometimes, with weakness and duplicity. Will a young woman remain loyal to her betrothed when he returns from the war maimed? How long can a caring nurse hold her finger on a severed artery and keep a soldier alive? And how does anyone comprehend the legacy of slavery and the brutality of war?

Pat Carr

The Death of a Confederate Colonel triumphs in its portrayal of desperate circumstances coated in the patina of the Civil War era, the complexity of ordinary people confronting situations that change them forever. Noted author George Garrett describes Carr’s book as “intensely imagined, elegantly and efficiently told, these eight short stories and the powerful novella comprising gracefully summon up for us our past.. Pat Carr is an admirably gifted writer, counted among our best and brightest; and this book is a memorable achievement.”

    Pat Carr, whose stories Leonard Michaels has described as “finely controlled and significantly moving,” has written twelve books of fiction, including The Women in the Mirror, winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award, and If We Must Die, a finalist in the PEN book awards. Carr, who lives in Elkins, Ark., will be a featured author at the Arkansas Literary Festival in Little Rock in April, and will be doing book signings this spring at other bookstores throughout the state.