Frederick Barthelme has been applauded as one of the finest fiction writers in America today. In Chroma, he offers fifteen odd, elegant, and heartbreaking stories in which wives give away husbands, lovers dispatch each other, and grown men steal stray dogs from parking lots at dawn. With his elegant, laconic style and his perfectly tuned dialogue, Barthelme creates an unforgettably wistful cast of characters, ordinary people moving carefully and curiously through a gently painful world.