Three of the stories in Calvin Wharton’s new book, Three Songs by Hank Williams (Turnstone), have appeared in Geist, and it is a pleasure to see them again in this handsome volume. The cover photograph pictures diverging highways somewhere in Texas, intended perhaps as a spiritual analogue to the imagined space of wanderers in the more northerly western worlds inhabited by his protagonists. I will always envy Wharton for this opening passage: “I saw my father for the first time since he died last May. He was driving a yellow three-ton with the windows rolled down, even though this last week of October had been cold and rainy.”