These stories mark the return of Mark Costello's now-legendary creation Michael Murphy, the character who first appeared in the acclaimed collection The Murphy Stories. Joyce Carol Oates wrote in the Washington Post Book World, "Murphy is a Midwestern cousin of Donleavy's Ginger Man, but much more human and troubled. . . . It is a remarkable achievement, the presentation of a complex, suffering, self-conscious, and very lyric personality as he endures his own being."