Ron Carlson is the author of nine books of fiction, most recently his novel Five Skies (Viking 2007), which is available in paperback in April 2008. Other works include A Kind of Flying (W.W. Norton 2003), the novel The Speed of Light (HarperCollins 2003), and the story collection At the Jim Bridger (Picador paperback 2003). His short stories have appeared in Esquire, Harper's, The New Yorker, Gentlemen's Quarterly, Epoch, The North American Review, and other journals, as well as The Best American Short Stories, The O'Henry Prize Series, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction and dozens of other anthologies. Among his awards is a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, the Cohen Prize at Ploughshares, and a National Society of Arts and Letters Literature Award. Carlson is Professor Emeritus in English/Creative Writing at Arizona State University and the Director of Graduate Fiction at the University of California, Irvine.
About this Book
In the title story a young man waiting in the Hotel Eden discovers - as many others have - that Eden is not a permanent domicile. In "Zanduce at Second," a baseball player turned killer-by-accident undergoes a surprising transformation. We root for escaped felon Ray ("A Note on the Type") as he carves his name on a culvert wall. We drive through the sweltering summer streets of Phoenix as a nineteen-year-old narrator goes through an unsettling sexual awakening ("Oxygen"). In these and other stories, whether his characters are getting sabotaged by nightcaps or encountering nudists on a rafting trip, Finally, in "The Chromium Hook," he takes us to a lovers' lane where he solves an ancient mystery.
In the title story a young man waiting in the Hotel Eden discovers - as many others have - that Eden is not a permanent domicile. In "Zanduce at Second," a baseball player turned killer-by-accident undergoes a surprising transformation. We root for escaped felon Ray ("A Note on the Type") as he carves his name on a culvert wall. We drive through the sweltering summer streets of Phoenix as a nineteen-year-old narrator goes through an unsettling sexual awakening ("Oxygen"). In these and other stories, whether his characters are getting sabotaged by nightcaps or encountering nudists on a rafting trip, Finally, in "The Chromium Hook," he takes us to a lovers' lane where he solves an ancient mystery.