The short fiction, creative nfiction, song lyrics, and poems contained in Volume 3 of the ongoing MOTIF anthology series reflect a common characteristic of the American experience: Work. Readers can begin the journey in the morning with the day shift, travel through the working day with the swing shift, and proceed into the hoot-owl hours with the night shift. As with previous MOTIF anthologies from MotesBooks, the goal is to provide a varied and colorful reading experience on a particular theme. Previous themes in the series have been Music and Chance. In this third volume on the familiar theme of Work, readers will find the dedicated efforts of 130 contributors as challenging and rewarding as a good day's labor. There is a stiff, overly contemplative vein in literature that connects the worlds we find in books to leisure. How many vels give us characters who apparently don't do anything? How many poems seem to emerge from a visit to a first-class resort? Literature of a different vein, however, rewards the reader with a hands-on grasp of the world as it is on the ground-characters do things with their hands, they touch tools and machines, they take the laundry from the line, they weed the garden, they bend their bodies to a task. In short, some literature gives us a world where people actually work. Some work, indeed, is drudgery, but some work leads us unexpectedly to beauty. Some of the work we do is a sign of love. The love that comes from work-from work of all kinds-is the force I find most palpable in this moving and wholly alive anthology. Sometimes that love is stern, sometimes it goes unrecognized, but there it is in the world, like two fingers pinching a clothespin, or a voice singing with the song of a shovel. We need love to wear its work clothes w and then, and I'm glad we have All the Livelong Day to remind us. -Maurice Manning, author of The Common Man, 2011 Pulitzer Prize finalist. The MOTIF series is published by MotesBooks -- www.MotesBooks.com.
