The only two-time winner of the American Fiction Prize, Clint McCown
offers up his first collection of short stories. "Music for Hard Times
is indeed the music we need for these (or any) hard times," says David
Jauss. "The words 'master storyteller' appear in a great many hyperbolic
blurbs these days, but Clint McCown is one of the few writers who
genuinely deserves that description. Like Mark Twain and Flannery
O'Connor, he writes stories that are consistently moving, wise, and
funny-the literary equivalent of a trifecta. And also like those
masters, he writes pitch-perfect prose that somehow manages to be
simultaneously colloquial and lyrical."