Sonny Liston was a friend of mine
Subtitle: stories
By: Thom Jones.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Little, Brown
Published: 1999
Place of publication: Boston
Language: eng
Number of pages: 312
Subjects: United States -- Social life and customs -- 20th century -- Fiction.
Description: Thom Jones's world encompasses dilapidated fight arenas, state mental hospitals, and 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. Now, with Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine, Jones serves up a dozen powerful stories that teeter between wicked humor and stinging pathos.

In "Fields of Purple Forever," a Vietnam vet swims alone across the English Channel, the Straits of Gibraltar, and the Bosporus to maintain "the edge" that kept him alive in wartime - and which is all he now has left. "You Cheated, You Lied" tells the deranged love story of two unstable people abandoning their lives and medications to live together in a shack on a Honolulu beach - with disastrous results.

And in the title story, a young amateur fighter stoically endures repetitive beatings because he knows the world of boxing shields and protects him from the even crueler world outside the ring.
Table of contents: title: Sonny Liston was a friend of mine; title: The roadrunner; title: A run through the jungle; title: Fields of purple forever; title: 40, still at home; title: Tarantula; title: Mouses; title: A midnight clear; title: Daddy's girl; title: My heroic mythic journey; title: I love you, Sophie Western; title: You cheated, you lied.