From the Introduction

Lurid Confessions, published in 1983 by Carpenter Press, went into a second printing the following year. A few years later the book was out of print. I have no recollection of what the press run was for either of those two printings but I imagine each couldn’t have been more than a few hundred copies. The press was a one-man operation in Pomeroy, Ohio, run by the writer and musician Bob Fox. Though Bob and I had been at Brooklyn College at the same time, we hadn’t known each other back then and though we occasionally corresponded in the years both before and after the book was published, we didn’t hook up in person till decades later when I went to Cincinnati to do a reading and a workshop. Bob had been playing blues guitar and singing professionally or semi-professionally all his life and was also for many years writer-in-residence and director of the Ohio Arts Council. From what I’ve been told, in the early days in New York he had sat in with Bob Dylan and Dave van Ronk at Gertie’s Folk City and had studied informally with Blind Gary Davis in Harlem. You can buy or download Bob’s CD, Primarily Blues, at Amazon and you can find his story “A Fable” in Sudden Fiction: American Short Short Stories. Another short story of his, “The Wedding” —I think it was published in his collection Destiny News— remains one of the most magical and satisfying brief fictions that I’ve ever read. The couple of days we spent together in Cincinnati occurred only five or six years before his untimely death and I’m not sure to this day that I’d ever thanked him warmly enough for publishing Lurid Confessions. If not, I do so now....

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