Ten spare short stories, set in eastern Kentucky, which revolve around the relationships over two decades of a poor working-class hill family. All the stories stay on the surface of people’s lives, but the surface is a telling, rich one of everyday speech and gestures. Most are at least in part about Wilgus Collier, whom we meet first as a young farm boy surrounded by argumentative relatives, and whom we follow into his twenties, when he visits home for a weekend after college (and is still surrounded by argumentative relatives). Mr. Norman is especially good at writing about the high currents of feeling that perpetually anger and annoy close members of a family.
— The New Yorker
A collection of stories portraying the adventures of Wilgus Collier and his relationships with his family in eastern Kentucky in the years following WWII. Unlike Norman’s first novel, Divine Right’s Trip, a story of the American counterculture, Kinfolks is about growing up in the Kentucky coal country. However, it does resemble Norman’s earlier work in its protagonist’s gradual progress toward self-discovery. Only nine years old in the first story, Wilgus grows in understanding about himself, the complex personalities of his relatives, and his ties with them. . . . Norman’s characterizations are sharp and clear, his stories well paced, and his themes should have significance for a wide range of readers.
— Choice
The title of this collection announces its two major subjects and themes: kinship and the relationships between family members—specifically, by the use of the Appalachian term kinfolks, an Appalachian family; and the focus on one particular person, Wilgus Collier. Unlike many other collections of short stories, these ten stories published together in 1977 are unified by this focus on subject and by a focal character. The stories can surely be read individually and each one analyzed separately, but they can also be read collectively as a kind of novel.
— Journal of Kentucky Studies
Like Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio or Hemingway's Nick Adams stories, both of which it resembles in form and style, Kinfolks is a short-story cycle dramatizing the growth of a young boy to early manhood, particularly as his development is reflected in changing relationships within a large Appalachian family. Like that of his mentors, [Gurney] Norman's work is novelistic in scope while preserving in the individual episodes the essential qualities of the short story. . . Norman may be the outstanding Appalachian storyteller of his generation.
— Louisville Courier-Journal
