The Time the Waters Rose

"In Ruffin's new collection, men, boats, and bodies of water collide unexpectedly, with results that are often humorous, violent, or both....These stories exploring how life on the water affects everyday people make for amiable reading, but they become most compelling when Ruffin taps into the bleaker impulses found below a more cordial façade."—Kirkus Reviews

"Paul Ruffin's extraordinary body of work is squarely within the tradition of the South's best weavers of tales."—American Book Review

"In these stories words break bright across pages roiling with laughter and tears. As they roll back from their high narrative marks, they deposit thoughts and feelings, the awareness that real living is hard and mysterious. Ruffin knows the hearts of place and people. At times both shined honeyed like the surface of a quiet sea just before evening. At other times both are dark as a shadowed lagoon, hiding water-soaked logs and home to alligators and water moccasins. Wonderful stories, tales that transform days and nights!"—Sam Pickering, author of Happy Vagrancy and All My Days Are Saturdays

"Paul Ruffin's The Time the Waters Rose recalls Melville's observation: 'Meditation and water are wedded for ever.' Factory workers, fishermen, free-thinkers, and ark-builders live hard, love hard, and die hard in this salty place of contradictions where refinery burn-off torches are dark candles casting light on 'God's spiny creatures of the briny deep.'"—Allen Wier, author of Tehano

"Having long ago succumbed to the mysteries of the ocean, Paul Ruffin adroitly traces the people and cultures along the most ravaged American coastline of the twenty-first century. This is a timely—if not overdue—collection of place, grace, and human experience."—Casey Clabough, author of Confederado: A Novel of the Americas