Travel, and the exhilarating experiences it offers us, is the shared concern of these stories, which have been chosen from among the hundreds that have appeared in the prestigious Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction series. More than seventy volumes, which include approximately eight hundred stories, have won the Flannery O'Connor Award. This stunning trove of always engaging, often groundbreaking short fiction is the common source for this anthology on childhood-and for planned anthologies on such topics as family, gender and sexuality, animals, and more. Travel can whisk us away to craggy mountainsides and sunny coastlines or bustling cities and mysterious jungles. Travel can excite and rejuvenate or intimidate and overwhelm. These sixteen stories reflect upon our immense, intriguing world and our explorations of it, whether you choose to follow the beaten path or abandon it.

In this funny, touching collection about music, identity, liars, and love, Geoffrey Becker brings us into the lives of people who have come to a turning point and lets us watch as they take, however clumsily, their next steps.

In the title story, an aging black singer who performs only Elvis songs despite his classic bluesman looks has his regular spot at the local blues jam threatened by a newly arrived Asian American with the unlikely name Robert Johnson. In "Man Under," two friends struggling to be rock musicians in Reagan-era Brooklyn find that their front door has been removed by their landlord. An aspiring writer discovers the afterlife consists of being the stand-in for a famous author on an endless book tour in "Another Coyote Story." Lonely and adrift in Florence, Italy, a young man poses as a tour guide with an art history degree in "Know Your Saints." And in "This Is Not a Bar," a simple night on the town for a middle-aged guitar student and jazz buff turns into a confrontation with his past and an exploration of what is or is not real.

In his depictions of struggling performers, artists, expectant parents, travelers, con-men, temporarily employed academics, and even the recently deceased, Becker asks the question, Which are more important: the stories we tell other people or the ones we tell ourselves?

Geoffrey Becker’s Dangerous Men was selected by Charles Baxter as the winner of the fifteenth annual Drue Heinz Literature Prize. His manuscript was selected from nearly three hundred submitted by published writers. In these tightly drafted stories, Becker creates a wide variety of distinct voices, peculiar characters, and odd stettings, with tantalizing emphasis on lonliness, loss, and the ever-present struggle to find one’s place in the world. \u201cIt was wrong to think that our presence would linger on, though it was to this notion that I realized I’d been grasping all along,\u201d the music-student narrator of \u201cDangerous Men\u201d says after an evening involving drugs, a fight, and a car accident, \u201cthe idea that in some way we were etching ourselves onto the air, leaving shadows that would remain forever.\u201d Many of the pieces incorporate music into the storyline. Music is a gathering point in his characters’ misfit lives. In \u201cMagister Ludi,\u201d a seventeen-year-old girl meets up with an older local guitarist whom her younger brother has invited over to their house when their parents are gone, and plays him for her own ends: \u201cShe makes Riggy drive right through the center of town, hoping that someone will see them - one of her friends, or one of her parents’ friends even, it doesn’t matter. She just likes the idea of being spotted in this beat-up car alongside someone so disreputable.\u201d In \u201cErin and Malcom,\u201d a bass player with an injured hand who still lives with his estranged wife, a singer, and her pet ferret, finds out how out of tune his life really is: \u201cSomething has gone wrong - he could see it in the way she looked at him over her morning bowl of cereal, and the way she didn’t as she peeled herself out of her Lycra pants and leopard shirts at night.\u201d Yet , even when the music seems quiet, there are tales of choice and happenstance. \u201cEl Diablo de La Cienega,\u201d set in New Mexico, is about a boy who accepts the challenge of a mysterious figure to a game of basketball, for very high stakes indeed. Charles Baxter - one of America’s great story writers - calls the story \u201ca small masterpiece. It has formal perfection, like a folktale. I thought it was wonderful.\u201d With leaps from the funny to the sad and the revelatory, these amazing stories explore dreams and longing with remarkable insight and imagination. These are stories you will not forget.