This uncompromising collection of stories comes from the widely acclaimed and award winning master of the short story, Bob Thurber. Here he weaves his tales around such facets of the human condition as Fathers and Fools, Women and Children, Marriage and Divorce, and Art and Artifice. Typically unsettling and revelatory, Thurber knows how to cast a story that depicts the coarse reality of life, and his skills are displayed here with both passion and sentiment. Thurber gives the reader a chance, not to peek, but to plunge head first into the deep, dark mystery of simple existence. Accompanied by photographs by the equally intrepid wordsmith and image maker Vincent Louis Carrella. Shades of Flannery O'ConnorNot since I first read Flannery O'Connor have I been so emotionally engulfed by an author who can bottle up his personal pain, distill it into liquid tragedy, and dip his quill deep in that black ink to paint stories so startling, so unflinching in the face of truth, that I find myself gripping the book with both hands, unsure whether to jump and cheer or shave my head in mourning. This rich writing is like cheesecake to the soul: addictive, seductive, intimate. I want more.- Susan Pieters, editor, Pulp Literature His prose is sharp, minimalistic and unflinching. -- The Sun Chronicle Visiting Thurberland is like entering a dusty basement junk shop in which every object looms out of the dark with frightening immediacy, and the morose faces of the dolls testify to a disquieting past -- or stopping by a sinister garage sale where the "everything's a dollar in this box" crate turns out to hold your once-loved but now eviscerated childhood playthings. Bob Thurber's second collection of dark and brilliant fictions in the man's signature minimalistic-fabulist style exposes the guts of literature to daylight, and it ain't pretty. In fact, adorned by Vincent Carrella's haunting photographs, you might even say this whole book is "nothing but trouble." - Andrew Wilson Bob Thurber's short, sharp, quietly ferocious tales are indeed filled with trouble--yet they are also filled with a strange magic. For all that they are unflinching, often shocking in their emotional violence, they seem to whisper, here is more life. And under a line like "time heals nothing," there is a soul that refuses to quit. -- Dawn Raffel, author of The Secret Life of Objects Over the years Thurber's work has received a long list of awards and honors and appeared in over 60 anthologies. With an established reputation for delivering lean, tight prose, his stories are straightforward and impactful, and his candid voice resonates, leading one to "undiscovered corners of the human heart." His stories are "authentic and have enormous verisimilitude. No false notes." -- Born in 1955 and raised in abject poverty, Bob made it through high school by the skin of his teeth. He spent the next twenty years working menial jobs while teaching himself to write. During that long apprenticeship, he studied and worked at writing nearly every day, refining his skills, before submitting his work for publication.  -- Since then, his remarkably concise stories (which he refers to as " small fictions" ) have found homes in numerous magazines, including Esquire , appeared on hundreds of websites, and received numerous awards, among them The Marjory Bartlett Sanger Award, The Meridian Editors' Prize, and The Barry Hannah Fiction Prize. He made Esquire's top-ten list in the magazines 78th anniversary short Fiction contest and has been nominated for numerous Pushcart Prizes. -- A recognized "pioneer in the Micro and Flash crafts" he is considered a "grand master" of the form, and his stories are frequently utilized in schools and universities in the US and abroad as teaching tools and examples of concise prose.  For more information visit: BobThurber.net