Short Story Collections

Presents eleven short stories of irrationality and madness set in the ramshackle South, lower Manhattan, and the Great Plains of nineteenth-century America

In ten sharply drawn tales, Madison Smartt Bell expands his masterly, inventive, and deftly textured fictional landscape to portray a collection of America's dispossessed characters. "Barking Man is a humane and mature book, the work of an important and talented writer."--The New York Times Book Review.

A story collection spanning New York to Haiti and beyond from the National Book Award–finalist and author of Barking Man . Spanning twenty years, Bell’s third collection of stories showcases his phenomenal literary range and his unwavering focus on characters looking in from the outside. Punks, hustlers, and lost souls of all ages and backgrounds are drawn with an exquisite eye for detail and astonishing compassion. As in the title story, many of these pieces refer to popular songs like “Fall on Me” and “Summertime,” or are centered around music (“Leadbelly in Paris”), and the settings travel the globe from New York to Paris to Haiti to London. Bell, a finalist for the 1995 National Book Award and the 1996 PEN/Faulkner Award and winner of the 1996 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for the best book of the year dealing with matters of race, once again affirms his status as one of our best writers, one “with an ear for the seemingly inaudible emotions of life” ( Los Angeles Times ).