Wrestling with Angels — John J. Clayton

Since publishing his first collection in the eighties, John J. Clayton has continued to write "powerful stories of urban life in America, of life often enough among Jews who carry their exile and their wilderness within them. The prose is powerful, an impressive mixture of sinuous sentences--which one reads as if one overhears thoughts. All of these characters are bruised. They are often enough triumphant, though, even if locked into mortal flesh, because they have an astonishing belief in the spirit." (Fredrick Busch) We are pleased to be publishing the definitive collection of Clayton's remarkable stories. Included are two previously published collections, Bodies of the Rich and Radiance: Ten Stories, together with a selection of previously uncollected stories, and a large collection of new stories, Wrestling with Angels, plus an introduction to his work by the author.

Clayton has been published in nearly all major literary magazines and has been reprinted in The Pushcart Prize anthologies and volumes of Best American Short Stories and O Henry Prize Stories.