You'll have a hard time trying to define "The Yesteryear Tales," by St. Charles author David Lee Kirkland.

Nobody would call the book a novel. Each of the 32 chapters is more or less self-contained. So that makes "The Yesteryear Tales" a collection of short stories, right? Officially, yes. But the same characters drift in and out of the stories, all of which are set in the same rural locale. And author Kirkland says in his foreword that much of what he writes about stems from the real-life recollections of his ancestors, with their roots in Appalachia.

However you want to pigeonhole this book, be sure to put it somewhere on your shelf. It's a countrified delight — a collection of folk wisdom and folk folly. The stories center on farming — and hunting, and ranching, and Sunday sermons and Saturday-night sexual shenanigans. You'll learn how to saddle a balky mount and how to rein in a randy neighbor. And you'll read all about it in the backwoods prose that Kirkland employs to tell his terse tales.

Kirkland never pinpoints the site of his small town. But a few passing references hint that it lies in Missouri's Ozarks, somewhere south of Springfield, Mo. His tales also drift through time (from the end of World War II until now) and in voice — some in the first person, others in the conventional third person.

Still, all of them sparkle with droll folk wit and wisdom. Kirkland's characters tend to speak in metaphors. In questioning whether a local hussy can change her ways, one narrator puts it this way: " 'Not hard to curdle sweet milk,' I said. 'Just a bit of vinegar will do the trick. Hard to imagine taking the vinegar out though, isn't it?'"

Kirkland shows a sure hand in dealing with the busybody nature of life in a small town. Take this passage about the violent death of an abusive husband: "Love draws the largest funeral crowds, but curiosity stands second, so a fair number of folks showed up for the funeral. Perhaps people wondered if the preacher could find any kind words to say about a man like Lester."

Ah, well. As another character muses in another story, "There ain't no horses what need stealing, but there are some men what need killing."

So set aside your urban sophistication and sample these little gems about country living — not the "country living" of real estate ads, but the real country living of real country people.

Harry Levins of Manchester retired last year as senior writer of the Post-Dispatch.