Book excerpt: These beautifully connected stories follow the adolescent exploits of protagonist Jerry Gordon throughout the American Southwest. Jerry's coming–of–age episodes find him seducing an innocent girl from the neighborhood, roping his first rodeo, garnering the aid of his older brother in a boyhood fight, keeping his dog from eating a rescued tiger kitten, navigating the rituals of secrecy and physical violence in a New England prep school, and coping, ultimately, with the cataclysmic event of his father's death. Mayer's prose is clear and perfectly concise in portraying the vulnerability, cruelty, and unfettered confusion of his beloved character. His original debut collection, these stories first appeared when Tom Mayer was astonishingly just twenty–one years old. His work appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, Story Magazine, and Sports Illustrated. This new Pharos Edition includes two short stories previously uncollected.