In the spare and deliberate stories in The Empire of the Dead, through situations both comic and bluntly melancholy, the future remains open for people—but at an indeterminate cost. Daily, characters weigh their indecision against the consequences of choice.Through a series of five linked stories, we meet Bern, a New York City architect yearning for a return to "first principles"—the "initial euphoria, the falling-in-love" that led him to consider a life devoted to sheltering others. In his ministrations to colleagues and friends, his memories of magical building feats now in the past, he learns the limits and the expansiveness of joy and need. In another tale, we meet a young painter in a Gulf Coast refinery town struggling to differentiate beauty from affliction. His sister's encounter with the singer Janis Joplin causes him to reconsider the nature of saintliness. And in the novella "The Magnitudes," a planetarium director, grieving over the...

In time for the 50th anniversary of Catch-22, Tracy Daugherty, the critically acclaimed author of Hiding Man (a New Yorker and New York Times Notable book), illuminates his most vital subject yet in this first biography of Joseph Heller.Joseph Heller was a Coney Island kid, the son of Russian immigrants, who went on to great fame and fortune. His most memorable novel took its inspiration from a mission he flew over France in WWII (his plane was filled with so much shrapnel it was a wonder it stayed in the air). Heller wrote seven novels, all of which remain in print. Something Happened and Good as Gold, to name two, are still considered the epitome of satire. His life was filled with women and romantic indiscretions, but he was perhaps more famous for his friendships--he counted Mel Brooks, Zero Mostel, Carl Reiner, Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer, Mario Puzo, Dustin Hoffman, Woody Allen, and many others among his confidantes. In...

The themes woven through The Woman in the Oil Field involve action and passivity and the different perspectives they inspire. Tracy Daugherty's characters walk the margins of life; seeking the safe periphery from which they assess their friends, lovers, and relatives who lead real lives. Daugherty treats perspective and insight as topics in themselves.

In The Last Love Song, Tracy Daugherty, the critically acclaimed author of Hiding Man (a New Yorker and New York Times Notable book) and Just One Catch, delves deep into the life of distinguished American author and journalist Joan Didion in this, the first printed biography published about her life. Joan Didion lived a life in the public and private eye with her late husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, whom she met while the two were working in New York City when Didion was at Vogue and Dunne was writing for Time. They became wildly successful writing partners when they moved to Los Angeles and co-wrote screenplays and adaptations together. Didion is well-known for her literary journalistic style in both fiction and non-fiction. Some of her most-notable work includes Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Run River, and The Year of Magical Thinking, a National Book Award winner and shortlisted for...

Everyday Psychokillers reaches to the edge of the psychoanalytical and jolts the reader back to daily life. The reader becomes the killer, the watcher, the person on the verge, hiding behind an everyday face.

A stunning tour de force, Tracy Daugherty's fourth novel explores the volatility of race, class, and economics as they affect three generations of a Houston, Texas, family, and traces the rise and decline of an inner city neighborhood from the point of view of a prodigal daughter. Twenty-something Telisha Washington returns after many years to the decaying Houston neighborhood where she was born, to renew old ties and come to terms with her family's enigmatic heritage. The product of a racially mixed union, she has spent her life straddling received definitions of race, class, gender, and culture. Her personal odyssey is centered inside a black neighborhood's convulsions, where violence, poverty, and the politics of gentrification take their toll. An unflinching meditation on family, race, sex, and love, as well as a dissection of public and private identity, Axeman's Jazz is a stark, but loving, portrait of contemporary urban America.

In this, his third collection, Tracy Daugherty focuses on social and cultural forces shaping people's intimate behavior. Set in Texas and Oklahoma, the stories and novella suggest that even politics is a kind of family squabble whose elusive solutions often come from unexpected quarters. In "Power Lines," a young man's sexual awakening in Midland, Texas, coincides with lessons about heroism and loyalty one hot summer that is suddenly seared with violence. In "The Standoff," a retired politician and his asthmatic grandson rediscover their bond on a trip to a small Oklahoma town where the old man has been asked to settle an "Indian dispute." In "Cotton Flat Road," a brother and sister lift the lid on their differences as he discovers her secret life across the tracks in the Texas oil town they grew up in.

The narrative interweaves history, myth, rumor, and news with the experiences of a young girl living in the flatness of South Florida. Like Grace Paley's narrators, she is pensive and eager, hungry for experience but restrained. Into the sphere of her regard come a Ted Bundy reject, the God Osiris, a Caribbean slave turned pirate, a circus performer living in a box, broken horses, a Seminole chief in a swamp, and a murderous babysitter. What these preposterously commonplace figures all know is that murder is identity: "Of course what matters really is the psychokiller, what he's done, what he threatens to do. Of course to be the lucky one you have to be abducted in the first place. Without him, you wouldn't exist."

In Tracy Daugherty's third novel, childhood innocence and political ambition meet just prior to the First World War in the person of Harry Shaughnessy, an Oklahoma farmer' son. Gifted with a booming speaking voice and a charismatic presence, the boy learns the socialist credo from his father, who takes him on the road—from laborers' camps to county fairs to Oklahoma City—to spread the people's gospel to farmers, miners, and oil workers. Along the way young Harry encounters other socialist crusaders—Eugene V. Debs, Oscar Ameringer, and the dynamic red-haired feminist Kate O'Hare.

Desire Provoked is an amusing look at modern living, while also a meditation on fatherhood, marriage and ambition. The cartographer protagonist of the novel, Sam Adams, can't seem to map out his own life while he maps everything else for a living.