Living Badly

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The twenty-one stories in this collection were picked from among the more than one hundred Walter Cummins published over the decades of his writing career. This group was selected not by any judges but by the author's whims on particular days. His criterion was whether he still liked them and whether he thought they demonstrated what he was capable of creating with the story form. They had passed an initial test of having been chosen by a variety of literary magazine editors for their publication. The works here first appeared in magazines such as the Virginia Quarterly Review, Bellevue Review, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Florida Review, and Confrontation. They also appeared in one of Cummins' seven short story collections.

“The central characters and others lived badly in the sense of Chekhov's lamentation. It's not that they are necessarily bad people, but rather that they don't know how to cope with their circumstances and end up making faulty decisions. Ultimately, they are like all of us in one way or another and deserve sympathy as ‘my friends.’"

The twenty-one stories in this collection were picked from among the more than one hundred Walter Cummins published over the decades of his writing career. This group was selected not by any judges but by the author's whims on particular days. His criterion was whether he still liked them and whether he thought they demonstrated what he was capable of creating with the story form. They had passed an initial test of having been chosen by a variety of literary magazine editors for their publication. The works here first appeared in magazines such as the Virginia Quarterly Review, Bellevue Review, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Florida Review, and Confrontation. They also appeared in one of Cummins' seven short story collections.

“The central characters and others lived badly in the sense of Chekhov's lamentation. It's not that they are necessarily bad people, but rather that they don't know how to cope with their circumstances and end up making faulty decisions. Ultimately, they are like all of us in one way or another and deserve sympathy as ‘my friends.’"