Seam Busters

"Seam Busters captures so much of what makes life good, of what the word community really means. It, too, delivers truth about the American way: people doing thingsall kinds of things, great and smallwith love."—Southern Literary Review

"Mary Hood has mastered the high wires of brevity and conciseness. Her deeply imagined characters speak as if they are offering their own true and often fabulous commentary on the book of life itself."—Idgie, Dew on the Kudzu

"Georgia novelist Mary Hood puts her fine gifts of scene-setting and characterization to work in this compact little saga of a rural sewing factory and the women bound by hard times to its ever-running machinery. Hood highlights the plentiful humor of her cast, and, in the face of a community tragedy, a humanity and warmth beyond all expectations."—Dot Jackson, author of Refuge

"Mary Hood busts the seams of the 'factory-broken' farmers in Ready, Georgia, where the Diet Coke and the Bible are both open. When her son is brought back from 'A-Stan,' Irene Morgan is straightening inseams. Everybody, also the Hmong, mourns and is folded into America today. Hood's fiction brings back Erskine Caldwell's realism and Marion Montgomery's compassion."—Jan Nordby Gretlund, Center for American Studies, University of Southern Denmark

"I don't believe Mary Hood is capable of writing an uninteresting sentence. She can say in three words what I can say in 160. Like all the great writers, Mary Hood has mastered the high wires of brevity and conciseness. Her deeply imagined characters in her novella Seam Busters, as in all of her writing, speak as if they are offering their own true and often fabulous commentary on the book of life itself."—Pat Conroy, author of The Death of Santini