The stories in this collection include a group first published in magazines three or four decades ago and another group whose magazine publications came in the past few years. Thus, they are divided into Old and New. Their range of subjects and approaches explore many varieties of storytelling. Walter Cummins has published six previous short story collections-Witness, Where We Live, Local Music, The End of the Circle, The Lost Ones, Habitat: stories of bent realism. More than 100 of his stories, as well as memoirs, essays, and reviews, have appeared in magazines such as New Letters, Kansas Quarterly, Virginia Quarterly Review, 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 international 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 the MFA in Creative Writing program at Fairleigh Dickinson University.