My Peoples Waltz

"When I was thirty-five and freshly separated and still a stouthearted pilgrim to myself, I took a job on the Gulf Coast swindling people. I sold fake trailer lot deeds to investors with souls more crooked than my own." This is the voice of Richard, the winning and irrepressible narrator of this novel in stories. Here, we follow Richards chaotic childhood informed by his parents passionate and rocky marriage, his mothers nervous breakdowns, his traveling salesman fathers erratic attempts to earn his mothers love again, and their eventual divorce, through Richards own trials with the women in his life.

Richard is like a traveler or pilgrim, moving from Haw River, North Carolina, to Arkansas to the Texas Gulf Coast and finally back to North Carolina again, as he and his people -- they drink hard, dance in their kitchens, lie and cheat -- struggle with their love and wrestle with their often inharmonious natures. In the end the narrator struggles to straighten out some small piece of his hearts crooked essence. My Peoples Waltz sadly celebrates the decisions we make to get on with the business of living.

• The stories in this collection have appeared in the Atlantic, GQ, Ploughshares, Best American Short Stories, and New Stories from the South: The Years Best.


• Heres what Dale Ray Phillips has said of his own work: "Writing a story is a strange act of discovery; generally, I find that what I have uncovered is nothing more than what I have always known. Also -- and Im embarrassed to admit this -- I love to lie, and fiction offers an acceptable channel for this compulsion."