The very best short stories and novellas from National Public Radio's Alan Cheuse are brought together in a quintessential collection. Countless listeners depend on the book reviews from Cheuse, America's "voice of books," and many of those listeners also follow his own critically acclaimed fiction and nonfiction. The title story--a flash fiction piece that acts as both prologue and an intriguing look at a writer's inspiration--takes us through a child's eyes into a fantastic land, one that informs, shapes, and travels along with the other stories in this stunning collection. These stories deal with life, death, love, family, work, and a deep exploration of the soul.

From Library Journal In these slice-of-life stories, we join characters progressing through critical, often life-changing experiences. Their magnetism is powerful, for despite the brevity of our time together, we as readers get involved with them and are concerned about their outcome once the story ends. In fact, finding that two of the stories contain the same characters, we are grateful for a second chance to try to understand how they arrived at their present situation and what they will do. These characters remind us that relationships can be transient--certainly Cheuse's most common theme. Interestingly, the stories, some of which have been published earlier, contain an unsettling mixture of both hope and despair, as if Cheuse has not made his final decision regarding the nature of the human condition.- Dorothy Golden, Georgia Southern Coll., StatesboroCopyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. Product Description Fourteen stories deal with the longing, insecurity, loneliness, and restlessness of those living in the new South