Author Barry Gifford chooses the novellas and stories that define his short-form fiction writing career.

A contemporary master of American fiction, drama, and nonfiction, Barry Gifford's novellas and stories are less well-known than novels like Wild at Heart, but his short fiction is the core of his creative output and includes some of his finest work. After releasing many story collections, here for the first time he assembles what he considers to be his most enduring novellas and stories.

In the title novella, a child leaves home to escape the predation of her mother's boyfriend. In "Ball Lightning," Amelia learns where her brother disappeared to, but not why. And in "Do the Blind Dream," an Italian family mourns the death of its matriarch and at the same time lets all the injustices and feuds that lay under the surface while she lived rise to the surface. Then there are the Roy stories, which Gifford has been writing for half a century, in which his boyhood protagonist is able to observe the pain and wildness of the adult world with almost an anthropologist's level-headedness.

Understated and at the same time iconic, here is Gifford's world, told in story after story, an America that is unhinged and unstoppable.