Stories in the realistic tradition of lives overlooked, voices unheard, and characters trying to overcome and transcend confining circumstances.

In The World of a Few Minutes Ago, award-winning author Jack Driscoll renders ten stories from the point of view of characters aged fourteen to seventy-seven with a consistently deep understanding of each character's internal world and emotional struggles. All of the stories are set against the quiet, powerful northern Michigan landscape and share a sense of longing, amplified by the beautiful but often unforgiving surroundings. With keen attention to the nuances of his characters and their lives, Driscoll explores both their attachments to the past and their as-yet-unseen futures as he considers relationships between loves, old friends, and parents and their children.

A twelve-year-old boy accompanies his father on a secret run to the slaughterhouse where he recently lost his job. A middle-aged divorcé waits to witness the execution of the man who murdered his daughter decades earlier. A seventy-seven-year-old man reassesses both his fifty-year marriage and his career as an AP war photographer. A sixteen-year-old girl drives through a snowstorm in a clandestine meeting with her driver's education instructor. A twentysomething couple breaks into houses to ignite the passion in their relationship. Each story is carefully crafted and lovingly delivered, as characters weigh their own feelings against their complicated perceptions of other people and the action swirling around them. Driscoll's Michigan shapes these people as surely as their grief and joy, as the setting often becomes a physical touchstone to which characters turn to navigate the immensity of the unknown universe.

Few authors have the flexibility of voice and the emotional range and depth of Driscoll, who is at his best in this collection. Readers of fiction will enjoy The World of A Few Minutes Ago.

Beautifully-crafted prose from one of Michigan's most original voices.

Elmore Leonard said about Jack Driscoll's stories, The guy can really write. And in The Goat Fish and the Lover's Knot, he once again demonstrates in every sentence the grace and grit of a true storyteller. The ten stories are mostly set in Michigan's northern lower peninsula, a landscape as gorgeous as it is severe. If at times the situations in these stories appear hopeless, the characters nonetheless, and even against seemingly impossible odds, dare to hope. These fictional individuals are so compassionately rendered that they can hardly help but be, in the hands of this writer, not only redeemed but made universal.

The stories are written from multiple points of view and testify to Driscoll's range and understanding of human nature, and to how the heart in conflict with itself always defines the larger, more meaningful story. A high school pitching sensation loses his arm in a public school classroom during show and tell. A woman lives all of her ages in one day. A fourteen-year-old boy finds himself alone after midnight in a rowboat in the middle of the lake with his best friend's mother. Driscoll is a prose stylist of the highest order -- a voice as original as the stories he tells.

Lovers of contemporary storytelling will revel in Driscoll's skill and insight on display in this unique collection.

Perry Lafond, approaching forty, knows he's had a decent life with his attractive, longtime wife, Marcia. But he's come to the point where he is not sure that he can continue on. In the meantime, there's the question of children. His wife, battling infertility, is obsessed with the idea of having a baby. Perry wants a child too--maybe. Suddenly, he can't keep his mind off other women. In his job as a probation officer he becomes recklessly infatuated with the pretty, beleaguered wife of a parolee who has a young child. Perry's own confusion endangers this child as well as a nephew under his care. Always unflinchingly honest, Jack Driscoll tracks a man's headlong--and just possibly redemptive--leap into chaos.

Winner of Pushcart's Seventeenth Annual Editors' Book Award, this first novel about a marriage in crisis has evoked extraordinary praise from readers Pam Houston and Rick Bass. In presenting Lucky Man, Lucky Woman with the Editors' Book Award, publisher Bill Henderson's citation included the following remarks: I was literally stunned by this first novel-amazed that one writer could evoke such sweetness and compassion about a middle-aged marriage and in such wonderful detail. The New York Times praised Jack Driscoll's short story collection, Wanting Only to Be Heard, for its extraordinary depiction of the psychic terrors that dwell on the fringes of human endeavor. In Lucky Man, Lucky Woman the author investigates those terrors much closer to home. Crowding forty, Perry Lafond knows he's had a decent life with his wife, Marcia, but he's just not sure if he wants to live that life anymore. His wife, battling infertility, is obsessed on the idea of having a baby. And Perry wants a child too, maybe. Suddenly, he can't keep his mind off other women, including the young, sad, and beleaguered wife of the parolee who Perry monitors in his job as a probation officer. Always unflinchingly honest, Lucky Man, Lucky Woman tracks a man's headlong-and just possibly redemptive-leap into chaos.