Plain People

"Plain, Plain" and nine other award-winning short stories reveal a unique peek of Amish underworld "plain living" as never before. Talton Weber lived among 4,300 Amish of northeast Ohio for twenty-five years and was privy to their unique religious ways, and these revealing short stories use fiction to document their trials of coping with such a rigid lifestyle within the settlements. The characters of Plain People are modern-day grotesques: rebellious Amish boys and girls whose forbidden activities fly in the face of stifling religious doctrines, overpowering and demanding district bishops who threaten to shun members at the slightest deviation, fractured marriages where divorce is the ultimate sin, isolated suffering individuals who try to inject modern methods into Old Order ways, and those who fall in love with the Amish and "yank over"-never to return to their former modern lives.