A GRACEFUL ACCOUNT OF SMALL-TOWN LIFE

AND BOTH SHALL ROW By Beth Lordan Picador, 178 pages, $21

Beth Lordan writes about small-town life with authority and grace. Even cows are afforded dignity in this collection of linked stories revolving around the rural town of Clayborne, a place where people stir jam into their cottage cheese and utter few epithets stronger than “Holey moley.” But there’s no lack of the dramatic: A snake appears on the kitchen floor of a woman’s trailer, and a tornado redistributes the contents of a local junk store so that a ventriloquist’s dummy ends up in the hands of a deaf child.