Other Worlds, Better Lives: A Howard Waldrop Reader: Selected Long Fiction, 1989-2003

Seven great long stories by the resident weird mind of America: A Dozen Tough Jobs (1989) Fin de Cycle (1990) You Could Go Home Again (1993) Flatfeet (1996) Major Spacer (2001) The Other Real World (2001) A Better World's In Birth (2003) Michael Dirda of the Wasington post Book World has written: "If Philip K. Dick is our homegrown Borges (as Ursula K. Le Guin once said), then Waldrop is our very American magic-realist, as imaginative and playful as early Garcia Marquez or, better yet, Italo Calvino." And award winning author Orson Scott Caes has written: "Now he brings us 'A Dozen Tough Jobs' [included in this volume], which is, yes folks, a retelling of the Labors of Hercules, set in a Mississippi town in the 1920s. Because it's Waldrop writing it, though, it's more than a comic reworking of an old myth. It's also a clear depiction of life in that sunbeaten, humid, fearful place and time. The rhythms of speech, the slang, the relations between the races, between rich and poor, between men and women, all are there, with the power and ugliness and majesty of real life. Waldrop's comedy comes from his true-seeing eye, and A Dozen Tough Jobs puts him right amoung William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Conner, and Harry Crews as one of the umcompromising prophets of the American South." Don't wait, click away and order this! Order two! One for you, one for a friend! But then I'm prejudiced about Howard Waldrop.