A subtly linked series of stories that chronicle two generations of a family from the Depression to World War II to the Vietnam War to the present. Characters include a jazz trumpeter, a Ukrainian teenager taken by the Nazis for slave labor in Germany, soldiers from World War II and the Vietnam War, and a strange crew of college professors and their wives from a small college in the Midwest. Lucas Carpenter's stories have appeared in Berkeley Fiction Review, Short Story, The Crescent Review, Nassau Review, The Chattahoochee Review, and South Carolina Review. He is also the author of three collections of poetry, one book of literary criticism, and many poems, essays, and reviews published in more than twenty-five periodicals, including Prairie Schooner, The Minnesota Review, College Literature, Beloit Poetry Journal, Kansas Quarterly, Carolina Quarterly, Concerning Poetry, Poetry (Australia), Southern Humanities Review, College English, Art Papers, San Francisco Review of Books, Callaloo, Southern History Journal, and New York Newsday. He is Charles Howard Candler Professor of Humanities Emeritus at Emory University.