About this ebook
The tie that binds men and women, that makes men do absurd things that they will very likely be sorry for later, is at the center of this prize-winning collection of stories.
There is, for example, Jack Segal, who is thirty-six and who owns a record store on Ocean Boulevard in Santa Monica and who has fallen in love—badly and madly in love—with the fourteen-yearold daughter of his friend Katzman. Segal can’t think. He eats, but it doesn’t taste like anything. He drives the freeways, floats above the city lights, and finds himself almost wishing that the Great Quake would come and solve everything for him.
Some of Camoin’s characters are running: Diehl, from the necessity of finishing his second novel, of deciding once and for all the fate of its central character, who may be Diehl himself; the jogger-narrator of the story “Peacock Blue,” from the pain of his life (“What lucky fools marathon runners are. They run for joy.”); Loveman, to El Paso and a hustler’s dream of paradise that turns into something else.
There is, for example, Jack Segal, who is thirty-six and who owns a record store on Ocean Boulevard in Santa Monica and who has fallen in love—badly and madly in love—with the fourteen-yearold daughter of his friend Katzman. Segal can’t think. He eats, but it doesn’t taste like anything. He drives the freeways, floats above the city lights, and finds himself almost wishing that the Great Quake would come and solve everything for him.
Some of Camoin’s characters are running: Diehl, from the necessity of finishing his second novel, of deciding once and for all the fate of its central character, who may be Diehl himself; the jogger-narrator of the story “Peacock Blue,” from the pain of his life (“What lucky fools marathon runners are. They run for joy.”); Loveman, to El Paso and a hustler’s dream of paradise that turns into something else.
About the author
FRANCOIS CAMOIN is the retired director of the creative writing program at the University of Utah. His work has appeared in the Kenyon Review, Playboy, the Mid-American Review, the Missouri Review, and Nimrod, among other publications. Camoin has received the Associated Writing Program’s Award for Fiction and the Salt Lake City Mayor’s Artist Award. He is the author of eight books of fiction and nonfiction including, most recently, the story collection April, May, and So On.
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