Title: Sonny Liston was a friend of mine
First published: 1999
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.
Subjects: Social life and customs, Fiction, Fiction, general, New York Times reviewed, Fiction, short stories (single author), Short stories, american
Places: United States
Time periods: 20th century
LC classification: PS3560.O546 S66 1999