From Powells.com
Thom Jones has no hope of being selected for Oprah's celebrated book club. Jones's raw stories of Haldol-fogged vets, self-deluded boxers, and advertising men in existential crisis smell too strongly of testosterone, sweat and despair for the daytime TV audience. More than any of his peers, Jones's characters reveal the peculiar, and often excruciating, paradoxes faced by the men of his generation. Vietnam looms large. As do a mental hospital or two not to mention an impressive panoply of drugs, both legal and not. But more than his choice of subject matter, what makes Thom Jones one of the most widely admired living American writers of the short story the "postmodern Hemingway" is his superior ability to create, with apparent ease, such richly complex and compelling human beings. In Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine, his third collection, Thom Jones demonstrates again that he is a shape shifter of the highest order. From the poignant title story, based loosely on the author's own experience as a young boxer, to the tough-talking Vietnam vet who swims the world's waterways in order to maintain "the edge" that sustained him during wartime, to the deranged, disastrous story of a pair of lovers who abandon their lives and, unfortunately, their medications in order to live in a shack on the beach, the characters in these stories struggle more often than not valiantly to secure an anchor in a sea with no bottom.
Table of Contents
Sonny Liston was a friend of mine -- The roadrunner --A run through the jungle -- Fields of purple forever --40, still at home -- Tarantula -- Mouses -- A midnight clear -- Daddy's girl -- My heroic mythic journey -- I love you, Sophie Western -- You cheated, you lied.