Short Stories & Tall Tales: and APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA a non-compulsory essay of an autobiographical nature

In Short Stories & Tall Tales, author Bill Simmons weaves together stories of his own life to explore the complicated—and forever incomplete—map of human behavior and the peculiar ways people operate. These eighteen short stories (and one essay) cover a wide range of topics and subjects but always circle back to a fascination with life and the pursuit of purpose. In “But the Angel Never Came,” a young widow cries out to God to heal her disabled son, and when things don’t go as planned, she sees only one solution left for her. In “His Honor Is No Soothsayer,” a judge watches in total dismay as extreme religious enthusiasm clashes with the harsh world of a town’s development. Others explore the world of an overreaching villain (“Fishing Over Iced Tea”), the friendship of two golfers up the death of one of them (“The Eleventh Fairway”), and the author’s physics school teacher with clay feet (“Remembering My Mr. Chips”). Full of the bizarre and the beautiful, the obvious and the unlikely, these stories navigate the various moments in life that most might consider unexceptional but could, in fact, be quite the opposite.