The Way People Run: Stories

In The Way People Run, one of America's finest writers, the author of Mason's Retreat ("magnificent"--Publishers Weekly) and In a Father's Place ("radiant"--The New York Times), gives us a new collection of stunning short stories, brilliant fiction about the deep emotional connections, and disconnections, between people and within people's inner lives. Against the backdrop of vivid settings, especially the Chesapeake Bay region and the American West, Tilghman writes with passion, generosity, and grace about the ways people con-front themselves and the lives they've created. In The Way People Run, chosen by Robert Stone for the 1992 Best American Short Stories volume, a man goes west to find a new job and, out of the framework of the familiar, loses his hold on his family and his old life. In Something Important, Peter Ramsey undertakes a reunion with his long-lost brother, and discovers that his wife is in love with someone else. In Things Left Undone, chosen by Tobias Wolff to appear in the 1994 Best American Short Stories, a young couple tries to survive a tragedy. As Andre Dubus said about In a Father's Place, Christopher Tilghman "is a spiritual writer who often looks at things the rest of us cannot see." Life's truths are at the heart of these magnificent stories by a modern American master.

Praise for Mason's Retreat

Magnificent...Tilghman's first novel places him securely in the ranks of our most accomplished writers."
--Publishers Weekly

Beautifully written...fully imagined...Few first novels are narrated with the clarity, economy, and masterful assurance Tilghman brings to this re-markably moving and persuasive tale."
--Entertainment Weekly

Rich with character and sweet with the scent of a Maryland farm in America's mid-century summer...The moral center of this novel is larger than all its sorrows, which have about them the inevitable arc of a star falling from a darkening sky."
--Gail Caldwell, The Boston Sunday Globe

Praise for In a Father's Place
A collection that signals the appearance of a gifted new writer."
--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

A simple, classic feel, as if written from deep in the American grain...It is a magnificent portrait."
--Matthew Gilbert, The Boston Globe

About Mason's Retreat

Echoes of The Great Gatsby, William Styron's Lie Down in Darkness, O'Neill, and Faulkner...a stunning individual achievement."
--Kirkus Reviews

Mason's Retreat is a brilliant book--full of wisdom and insight into the workings of the soul. The language is perfect. Every paragraph holds a treasure. This is one of the most thoroughly satisfying novels you will ever read." --Kaye Gibbons

Powerful...a work of surpassing thematic seriousness and fictive artistry. In all respects, Mason's Retreat is exemplary."
--Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World