Cloudbursts

Book excerpt: From the acclaimed author of Ninety-two in the Shade: Set in the seedy corners of Key West, the remote shore towns of the Bahamas, and the unforgiving landscape of Big Sky Country, a “uniformly brilliant” collection (The New York Times Book Review) of familial dysfunction, emotional failure, and American loneliness that celebrates the human ability to persist through life's absurdities For more than four decades, Thomas McGuane has been heralded as an unrivaled master of the short story. Now the arc of that achievement appears in one definitive volume—forty-five stories, including two new and six previously uncollected pieces. These are stories of people on the fringes of society, whose twisted pasts meddle with their chances for companionship, moving from the hilarious to the tragic and back again. “A master of the short story... Cloudbursts is clearly the product of a life's worth of thought and feeling and experience; it ought to be savored.” —The New York Times Book Review