Introduction

I lived, in the years before my divorce, in a house with a permanent guestroom. I had furnished this room as my ideal guest accommodation and kept a bookshelf there of short story collections only. It was a move based on the premise that short stories can keep an overnight visitor well-stocked in reading material without making them want to borrow the whole book to finish it. I don’t lend books unless I don’t want them back because they go so often unreturned, even if unintentionally. The twelve stories in this personal anthology each come from a book that once sat on that shelf in a house and a marriage now long left behind. I still have the books. Welcome to my virtual guestroom.