Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine: Stories

Thom Jones

nov 2009 · Distribuido por Back Bay Books

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The author's world encompasses dilapidated fight arenas, state mental hospitals & chaotic emergency rooms. The inhabitants are his brilliantly etched characters, who battle desperately against fate in a game of life they cannot win but dare not lose. As we approach the end of the century & the millennium, no one writes better or more vividly than Jones does about the personal, private apocalypses we all face in our darkest moments. In one story, a Vietnam vet, a Recon Marine, swims alone across the English Channel, the Straits of Gibraltar, & the Bosporus to maintain "the edge" that kept him alive in wartime - & that is all he now has left. In another, a brilliant doctor verges on a breakdown. In the title story, a young amateur fighter stoically endures repetitive beatings because he knows the world of boxing shields & protects him from the even crueler world outside of the ring. A number of these stories have appeared in different forms in the New Yorker, Playboy, & Esquire.

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Thomas Douglas Jones was born in Aurora, Illinois on January 26, 1945. While still a teenager, he joined the Marines. He was discharged after being savagely beaten in a boxing match and mistakenly given a diagnosis of schizophrenia. He received a bachelor's degree from the University of Washington in 1970 and a master's in fine arts from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. At the age of 47, he was recovering from alcoholism and addiction to prescription drugs and working nights as a janitor in a high school. He mailed an unsolicited, fictionalized Vietnam War story entitled The Pugilist at Rest to The New Yorker. It was printed in 1991 and won the O. Henry Award in 1993 for best short story. His short story collections include The Pugilist at Rest, which was nominated for a National Book Award; Cold Snap: Stories; and Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine. He died from complications of diabetes on October 14, 2016 at the age of 71.