Mary Hood is the author of "Familiar Heat" and "How Far She Went", a winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction.

Inspired with the essence of Mary Hood's native South and spiced with intrigue and the dark side of human nature, this collection of stories offers the drama, humor, and heartache of everyday life and unexpected tragedy - with more than a few twists. The stories cover the terrain of transition between old and new, history and the present, holding on and letting go. In Finding the Chain, Cliffie struggles to overcome her ties to the past and forge a beginning with her newly formed family. Moths shows how one man's fortitude, friends, and love of nature help him see his life of poverty in a new light. In the title novella, Delia struggles to overcome her fears of separation and abandonment in the face of her father's suicide. With characters, situations, and settings that capture the turmoil of lives - and of a region - caught in transition between the past and present, the stories of And Venus Is Blue portray both the uncompromising harshness of life and the power of human tenacity.