This collection of four prose and four intimately told verse stories was first published in 1977, and the following year Peter Taylor was given the Gold Medal Award for the short story by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Set mostly in Nashville and Memphis amid Taylor's fictional genteel Tennessee society, these tales belie serene manners and lovely neighborhoods with undercurrents of irony, violence, disgrace, sexual transgressions, and generational divide. Often shadowing male despair in the modern world, they describe the power of unleashed passion once the restraint of custom has given way.