Ron Rash has long been a revered presence in the landscape of American letters. A virtuosic novelist, poet, and story writer, he evokes the beauty and brutality of the land, the relentless tension between past and present, and the unquenchable human desire to be a little bit better than circumstances would seem to allow (to paraphrase Faulkner). In the 10 stories of his new collection, In the Valley: Stories and a Novella Based on Serena (Doubleday), Rash spins a haunting allegory of the times we live in — rampant capitalism, the severing of ties to the natural world in the relentless hunt for profit, the destruction of body and soul with pills meant to mute our pain — and yet within this world he illuminates…