Twelve short stories by the National Book Award finalist of Pugilist at Rest follow the stories of mental hospital affiliates, including a Vietnam vet, a brilliant but burned out doctor, and a young amateur fighter. 25,000 first printing. Welcome back to the world of boot camp, boxing gyms, psych wards, and pharmaceutical highs. Once again, Thom Jones seems less to write fiction than to allow his characters to pour their stories directly into the reader's ear. Here the cast includes some of the usual suspects--jittery fighters, Marines, Vietnam vets--as well as some new but equally quirky voices, from a nebbishy vice principal to a 92-year-old woman. First seen in Jones's debut collection, The Pugilist at Rest , the crack Marine recon team Break On Thru makes several more sorties--most notably in "Fields of Purple Forever," in which the civilian Sergeant Ondine takes up swimming much the same way Odysseus, say, took up sailing: "Ondine a night swimmer and he all over the night. Captain of the night. I swim in the fields of purple. Nothing and no one can harm me forever." "Tarantula" chronicles the rise and fall of John Harold Hammermeister, vice principal of W.E.B. Du Bois High School, where the students fail to be impressed by his caged spider and the frustrated janitors prove his undoing. "My Heroic Mythic Journey" follows the downward career arc of its boxer protagonist, who becomes featherweight champion of the world only to fall for a "bleach-bottle blond with a cheating heart" and a loaded .38. Most winning of all is the elderly narrator of "Daddy's Girl," who manages to preserve her faith even with two dead husbands, countless family tragedies, and eyelids growing up into her eyes: "You have to believe like a little child. Believe it because it's impossible." Only the overlong concluding story, "You Cheated, You Lied," disappoints; as chaotic as the main characters' mood swings, it follows two crazy teenagers in love and off their medication. But this tale is an exception in an otherwise noteworthy collection. Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine only confirms Jones's place as one of the most original American writers at work today. --Mary Park Whether set in a working-class Chicago suburb, in the jungles of Vietnam, or on the beaches of Hawaii, these stories share a vision of life as nasty, brutish, and, in some cases, short. The title story deals with a Golden Gloves boxer whose struggles with his dying stepfather are more difficult than any he faces in the ring. In "A Run Through the Jungle," a Marine recon unit makes a secret incursion into Cambodia on a mission to assassinate a renowned Viet Cong general. "You Cheated, You Lied" concerns a turbulent and faithless affair between a former amateur boxer and a flighty manic-depressive. By the author of the acclaimed The Pugilist at Rest and Other Stories (LJ 4/15/93), these are harrowing, hard-edged tales of a world where the line between hope and despair, sanity and insanity is thin, indeed. -?Lawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, Andover, MA Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. Through two previous collections of short stories, The Pugilist at Rest (1993) and Cold Snap (1995), Jones has built up a reputation as a contemporary master of the form. Quiet little domestic dramas populated by people like you and me are not Jones' interest. He likes loud, nervous characters who are up to their eyeballs in action, not sitting around contemplating the unfairness of utility bills. The title story (and isn't it a great title?) is about a young boxer, Kid Dynamite, whose pummeling in the ring serves to keep the real world at bay. In "I Love You, Sophie Western," high-schooler Frankie Dell has to take care to take his lithium tabs to keep cool, but he still has to perform a very uncool sex act to get the down payment for a car. For "Daddy's Girl," Jones assumes a female voice and point of view in telling a 92-year-old woman's tale about her sisters and their relationship to their abusive, alcoholic father. Doctoring, soldiering--other characters are engaged in other frenetic activities in Jones' funny, busy, delectable stories. Brad Hooper Twelve stories about the gritty world of gyms, barracks, brothels, and loony bins that Jones (Cold Snap, 1995, etc.) has already staked out as his own. The tough-guy approach in fiction has fallen (partly) out of favor since Hemingways day, but Jones can pull it off with style and without embarrassment. Most of the characters here are decent working-class stiffs who find themselves swamped in a world of mendacitylike Ondine, the Marine sergeant of The Roadrunner, A Run Through the Jungle, and Fields of Purple Forever, who sees action in Vietnam and cannot settle down to peacetime routines afterward. Instead he takes up swimming as both career and pastime, and travels the world to swim across the English Channel, the Straits of Gibraltar, and the Bosphorus. Theres another kind of malcontent