The worlds of these stories challenge the realities we think we inhabit, bending them away from a norm, some just a shade askew, others warped into a radical strangeness. All confound our expectations. Walter Cummins has published five previous short story collections-Witness, Where We Live, Local Music, The End of the Circle, and The Lost Ones. More than 100 of his stories, as well as memoirs, essays, and reviews, have appeared in magazines such as Kansas Quarterly, Virginia Quarterly Review, New Letters, Under the Sun, Arts & Letters, Confrontation, Bellevue Literary Review, Connecticut Review, The Laurel Review, Other Voices, Georgetown Review, Contrary, Sonora Review, Abiko Quarterly, Weber Studies, Midwest Quarterly, West Branch, South Carolina Review, Crosscurrents, Crescent Review, The MacGuffin, in book collections, and on the Web. With Thomas E. Kennedy, he is 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. He teaches in Fairleigh Dickinson University's MFA in Creative Writing and MA in Creative Writing and Literature programs.