A Bed of Nails

by Ron Tanner

Price 168 pages, $14.95 paper

ISBN 1-886157-42-1

The author is fabulously imaginative, experimental, witty, often breathtaking...both male and female voices are handled beautifully, although the prose is what we've come to call "muscular." At first I felt that this was actually two collections, one concerned with life as we know it and one as we fear it will be--but came to believe that the worlds are perfectly married through their askew inventiveness and their witty contemporary language. It's very assured and audacious work. -- Janet Burroway, 2002 Judge, Chandra Prize

Assignment: Combine the tender realism and precise social observation of an Alice Adams with the wild machinations of a Donald Barthelme. Logically impossible, you say? Not for Ron Tanner, as his startling debut collection--with its clever premises, moving material and wildly imaginative details--proves. -- Debra Spark

Ron Tanner has a talent for creating stories that provoke his characters and readers to come to terms with risks--physical, emotional, and political. A compelling collection. -- Susan Hubbard

The stories in Ron Tanner's wonderfully ingenious and diverse collection create a whole new image of the complex interrelationships between art and life. A Bed of Nails is a rigorous pleasure. -- Madison Smartt Bell

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Before pursuing a writing career, Ron Tanner worked as a musician on the California honky-tonk and Nevada casino circuits. He was a James A. Michener fellow at the University of Iowa, where he received his MFA. He also holds a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His stories have appeared in such magazines as The Iowa Review, The Massachusetts Review, and The Quarterly. His awards include a Pushcart Prize, a Maryland State Arts Council grant, the New Letters Literary Award, The Literary Review's Charles Angoff Award, and the Faulkner Society Award. He chairs the Communication Department at Loyola College in Baltimore, Maryland. A Bed of Nails is his first book. He is now working on a novel about the Marshall Islands.

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