Growing up in 1850s Alabama, Cooper Waterman longed to become a man of letters - a lofty dream for a handicapped lad who was poor and fatherless, and left school at 13 to become a shoeshine boy. But with his imagination, a notebook and a stub of a pencil, he rose to become a newspaper reporter, eventually going off to serve as a Civil War correspondent. Covering an epic American struggle, Cooper survives the siege of Vicksburg and rides through bloody cavalry battles with the formidable General Nathan Bedford Forrest, taking time along the way to write letters to home for hundreds of wounded...

A teen-age girl is awakened in the wee hours of the morning to serve as her father's getaway driver when he pulls a shotgun robbery at a poker game. A woman bar owner in the French Quarter shoots a drug-addled, would-be robber dead, then covers up the incident with the help of the police. A small boy in Alabama loses his innocence with the death of a goldfish. From the author of The Letter Writer, the engaging Civil War novel, now comes this poignant collection of short stories set along the Gulf Coast that are at once humorous, touching and disturbing portraits of working-class people, and...