The ten stories in Winter Money are set in rural Kentucky and West Virginia, in dim horse racing and river towns. The men in Andy Plattner’s stories are tough and uncertain, the women independent and disappointed, but they are strong-willed and high-spirited, always believing there’s a better life, just over the horizon, after the next race.The title story depicts the life of a jockey agent who has seen some bad breaks but knows in his heart he can turn things around if he...

Long time jockey Carl Arvo knows the things he can have and the things he cannot. An unexpected turn of fortune gives him the chance to be with a woman, Christine Fleming, who in some ways is the person he's been looking for his entire life.

Work, and the coffee-fueled day-to-day grind, is the shared concern of these stories, which have been chosen from among the hundreds that have appeared in the prestigious Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction series.More than seventy volumes, which include approximately eight hundred stories, have won the Flannery O'Connor Award. This stunning trove of always engaging, often groundbreaking short fiction is the common source for this anthology on work—and for planned anthologies...