Midwest Story

Walter Kim has been an assistant editor at V.F., media critic for the defunct New York weekly 7 Days, and a senior editor at Spy. But, for those expecting his debut collection of stories, My Hard Bargain (Knopf), to contribute to the deluge of city-slick, hyper-urbane fiction—surprise. The tone of these thirteen tales, set mostly in the Midwest, is wide-eyed and passionate, and their subjects include such distinctly untrendy fare as family fealty, religious faith, and farming. As it turns out, Kim, twentyeight, is just following an old literary dictum: Write about things you know best. A lapsed Mormon raised on a small farm in Shafer, Minnesota (population, two hundred), he never set foot near New York until his matriculation at Princeton. Now he's fled back to the heartland to complete his second book, a novel, but keeps well enough in touch—via cable TV and fax—to maintain his post as an American cultural correspondent for the BBC. Says Kim, "It's like being behind the lines in a war, where you can relax and read the dispatches from the front without having to hear shells whistling overhead."

J.R.