From the pages of the New Yorker, Esquire, and the Paris Review, "Edward Hoagland's collected stories are dazzling" (Ann Beattie).

Saul Bellow called him "one of the very best writers of his generation." Newsweek praised him as "a marvelous writer." Edward Hoagland, renowned travel writer and essayist, is also an extraordinary writer of fiction, as readers of his stories "The Final Fate of Alligators" and "Kwan's Coney Island" can attest. Assembled here are stories new and old, spanning from 1960 to the present. First published in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Esquire, American Review, and Saul Bellow's famous literary magazine, The Noble Savage, and widely anthologized, in The Best American Short Stories among others, Hoagland's work continues to amaze readers with evocative prose and finely etched characters.

There are the death-defying motorcycle trick riders in the carnival's Devil's Tub, a man who keeps an alligator in his bathtub, a Chinese laundry worker in Coney Island in search of love, a frontiersman who saves himself from a grizzly bear by hiding in a beaver dam, three men from a circus looking for trouble at a rodeo, and a washed-up boxer trying to hang on to his career. From the cramped and gritty streets of New York City to the wide open spaces of the Old West, Hoagland's characters pine, ache, create, observe, love, learn, and live in such precisely rendered stories that we are transported into each of their peculiar worlds.