Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine - Tapa dura

Thom Jones' 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.

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. As we approach the end of the century and 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, and the Bosporus to maintain "the edge" that kept him alive in wartime -- and 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 and 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, and Esquire.