Text from the back cover:
Jerry Craven drew these seventeen stories from real life, from the eternal landscape of the human heart. They read like masterful works of fiction, but they are all true, so none of the names have been changed to protect the innocent or the guilty.
"Today," Craven writes in the preface, "the events recounted in these writings jolt with alien strangeness, but when I was a child the incidents felt normal enough, for the bizarre people who acted them out were prosaic relatives and neighbors, and the now exotic landscapes were the essence of everyday experience. Today these people seem the stuff of fiction, so I found it easy to write these stories about them—stories that look like fiction but are not."
Waiting for Grace
Stoning the Tooth Fairy
Shooting a Monkey
Poison
Saving a Songbird
Learning the Stars
Catching a Thief
Hunting Tigers
Pepper Candy
Going Native
Gold and Diamonds
Arm Wrestling with Fish
Gunrunner
Tar and White Paint
Picking Figs in Friendswood
Ratboys
The Architecture of the Dead
These tales will take you from Texas to Venezuela and will show you people who are comical, tragic, loveable, terrible, and always touchingly human.
Front Cover Painting: Tommy Humphey