Funny, moving short fiction from the author of Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You: "[An] elegantly acute and mysteriously beguiling writer" (The Boston Globe).
This collection of stories represents the best of Peter Cameron's work from the 1980s, much of it first published in the New Yorker, the Kenyon Review, and the Yale Review. In these richly layered stories, sophisticated urbanites and lonely drifters alike face down the sad limitations to their dreams. Highlights include the O. Henry Award–winning stories "Excerpts from Swan Lake," about a young gay couple from New York coping with suburban suspicion, and "Homework," about a boy yearning for the order of the classroom after cutting school to deal with the death of his dog.