Hailed by Frank O'Connor as one of 'the greatest living storytellers,' J.F. Powers, who died in 1999, belongs in the succession of outstanding twentieth-century writers - among them Hemingway, Welty, O'Conner, and Carver - who have given to the short story an unmistakably American cast. In three slim collections of perfectly crafted stories, published over a period of some thirty years and brought together here in a single volume for the first time, Powers wrote about many things- basketball and jazz, race riots and lynchings, the Great Depression and the flight to the suburbs. His great subject, however - and one that was uniquely his - was the life of priests in Chicago and the small towns of the Midwest. Powers very human priests, who include do-gooders, gladhanders, wheeler-dealers, petty tyrants, and even the odd saint, struggle to keep up with the Joneses in a country unabashedly devoted to consumption. These beautifully written, deeply sympathetic, and very funny stories are an unforgettable record of the precarious balancing act that is American life.… (more)