"I was deeply moved. It is a brilliant meditation on life and death. Elegantly written and utterly original, this book will surely endure." ROBERT OLEN BUTLER, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of 'A Good Scent From A Strange Mountain' Robert McGowan's 'A Long and Indeterminate Perambulation' is not a conventional piece of storytelling. Told from the viewpoint of a 75-year-old "philosopher artist," this novella is driven far more by character and idea than by narrative. This book presents her diary entries following a more or less daily walk around her neighborhood. These entries provide...

These stories are derived of the author's ten-year struggle (1982-1991) on behalf of the endangered South Main Street Historic District in downtown Memphis, Tennessee. The photographs are from a 1986 series of gelatin silver photos taken by McGowan in and near the district. The stories focus in large measure on confrontations with inept and visionless city agencies and arts funding groups and the frustrations inherent in seeking to work with such entities toward district revitalization. Memphis' South Main Street Historic District, once neglected and deteriorating, much of it on the verge of...

Derived of the author's Vietnam War experience, the thirty-seven stories in this sometimes harrowing, sometimes hilarious collection look back at the Vietnam War from a distance of forty or more years, nearly a half-century, and via the perspectives of not only the soldiers themselves, but also their children, spouses, siblings, parents, friends. Nothing comparable to this collection exists within the literature growing out of the Vietnam War. NAM is hardly just another batch of macho war stories. These short fictions, most of them memoir-based, neither glorify nor even excuse war but come...