Awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his bestselling Empire Falls - also named the year's best novel by Time -- Richard Russo now focuses, in his first book of short fiction, on a fresh and fascinating range of human behavior. With a fluency of tone that will surprise even his devoted readers, he captures both bewildering horror and heartrending tenderness with an absorbing, compassionate authority.

We warm to these newcomers -- as to all Russo's characters -- almost despite ourselves. A jaded Hollywood moviemaker uncovers a decades-old flame he never knew he'd harbored. A precocious fifth grader puzzles over life, love and baseball as lie watches his parents' marriage dissolve. Another child is forced into a harrowing crosscountry escape whose actual purpose lie learns only after the fact. An elderly couple rediscovers the power and the misery of their relationship during a long-awaited retreat to a resort island. And in the title story, a septuagenarian min invades the narrator's college writing workshop with an incredible saga.

A masterful novelist here extends his versatility and accomplishment, in a collection that demonstrates yet again that "there is a big, wry heart beating at the center of Russo's fiction" (The New Yorker).