The twenty-one stories in this collection were picked from among the more than one hundred Walter Cummins published over the decades of his writing career. This group was selected not by any judges but by the author’s whims on particular days. His criterion was whether he still liked them and whether he thought they demonstrated what he was capable of creating with the story form. They had passed an initial test of having been chosen by a variety of literary magazine editors for their publication. The works here first appeared in magazines such as the Virginia Quarterly Review, Bellevue Review, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Florida Review, and Confrontation. They also appeared in one of Cummins’ seven short story collections.

The central characters and others lived badly in the sense of Chekhov’s lamentation. It’s not that they are necessarily bad people, but rather that they don’t know how to cope with their circumstances and end up making faulty decisions. Ultimately, they are like all of us in one way or another and deserve sympathy as “my friends.”

Author: Walter Cummins
232 pages, 2026
Literature | Short Fiction
ISBN: Paperback: 9781947175976

Walter Cummins has published eight short story collections—Witness, Where We Live, Local Music, The End of the Circle, The Lost Ones, Habitat: stories of bent realism, Telling Stories: Old and New, Living Badly. His essay collections are Irresponsible and Maladjusted, Death Cancer Madness Meaning, and Knowing Writers. More than 100 of his stories, as well as memoirs, essays, and reviews, have appeared in magazines such as New Letters, Kansas Quarterly, Virginia Quarterly Review, Under the Sun, Arts & Letters, Confrontation, Bellevue Literary Review, Connecticut Review, The Laurel Review, Other Voices, Georgetown Review, Contrary, Sonora Review, Abiko Quarterly, Weber Studies, Midwest Quarterly, West Branch, South Carolina Review, Crosscurrents, Crescent Review, The MacGuffin, in book collections, and on the Web. His other books include co-authorship of two on Florham, the Vanderbilt-Twombly estate, and, with Arthur T. Vanderbilt, a work on the life of the Twombly chef, Joseph Donon. With Thomas E. Kennedy, he was founding co-publisher of Serving House Books, an outlet for novels, memoirs, and story, poetry, and essay collections. For more than twenty years, he was editor of The Literary Review.