The twenty-one stories in this collection were picked from among the more than one hundred Walter Cummins published over the decades of his writing career. This group was selected not by any judges but by the author’s whims on particular days. His criterion was whether he still liked them and whether he thought they demonstrated what he was capable of creating with the story form. They had passed an initial test of having been chosen by a variety of literary magazine editors for their publication. The works here first appeared in magazines such as the Virginia Quarterly Review, Bellevue Review, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Florida Review, and Confrontation. They also appeared in one of Cummins’ seven short story collections.

The central characters and others lived badly in the sense of Chekhov’s lamentation. It’s not that they are necessarily bad people, but rather that they don’t know how to cope with their circumstances and end up making faulty decisions. Ultimately, they are like all of us in one way or another and deserve sympathy as “my friends.”

Walter Cummins has published seven short story collections—Witness, Where We Live, Local Music, The End of the Circle, The Lost Ones, Habitat: sto- ries of bent realism, Telling Stories: Old and New. He also has four collections of essays and reviews—Knowing Writers, Death Cancer Madness and Mean- ing, Irresponsible and Maladjusted, and Seeking Authenticity. More than one hundred of his stories, as well as memoirs, essays, and reviews, have appeared in magazines such as New Letters, Arts & Letters, Kansas Quarterly, Virginia Quarterly Review, Under the Sun, Confrontation, Bellevue Literary Re- view, Connecticut Review, in book collections, and on the Web. With Thom- as E. Kennedy, he is founding co-publisher of Serving House Books, an outlet for novels, memoirs, and story, poetry, and essay collections. For more than twenty years, he was editor of The Literary Review.

His other publications include Our Literary Travels and The Literary Traveler, co-written with Thomas E. Kennedy; Programming Our Lives: Television and American Identity, co-written with George Gordon; and collaboration in fifive books on the Vanderbilt-Twombly Florham Estate.

He is a professor of English Emeritus at the Florham Campus of Fair- leigh Dickinson University, where he taught in the MFA Program in Creative Writing and the MA Program in Creative Writing and Literature for Educators. His degrees are a BA in English from Rutgers and an MA in Humanities, MFA in Creative Writing, and PhD in English from the University of Iowa.

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