Books, Arts & Manners: Sentenced to Sleep

Off for the Sweet Hereafter, by T. R. Pearson (Linden Press/Simon & Schuster, 283 pp., $17.95)

“He’s got a good ear”: Few accolades are more likely to turn a writer’s head. But what if the ear on that head has been used to record an interminably garrulous story-teller of gargantuan cuteness?