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Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine
Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine: Stories | Thom Jones
2 posts | 2 read
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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Oblomov26
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Well after reading this short story I went and purchased a collection of Jones short stories. A young man avoids the necessity to face the world and grow up by pursuing a semi-professional career as a boxer, even though in his heart he knows that he lacks the instinct the ability to be a champion finds himself facing an old foe, in a fight which will determine his future. Not a uplifting Rocky style story, much more realistic and grim in tone.

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HardcoverHearts
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Short story Sunday! (That‘s not a real thing, but I‘m so excited about my Faber 20 collection that I have binged every chance I could on these gems.) I‘m relaxing in a Lush bath, with three of these at my fingertips. Is anyone else reading these? I need to talk to someone about Cosmopolitan by Akhil Sharma! Hope everyone had a great reading weekend.

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