Winner of the 1995 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, selected by Amy Bloom.

"[Lee Martin's] own distinctive voice has the qualities of his favorite setting: the commonplace and middle-class turned over with a searchlight of want and need to know. Morticians and insurance men, salesmen and farmers; women hoping to make life more beautiful and less pressing with delicate, bewildering hobbies and necessary flirtations; boy who veer from shame to pride, from decency to irredeemable wrongs, in an afternoon; people how do not quite recover, during the time of our acquaintance, but do not give up gracefully." —from the Foreword by Amy Bloom