Ron Carlson is the author of eight books of fiction, most recently his selected stories A Kind of Flying, (W.W. Norton 2003) the novel The Speed of Light (HarperCollins 2003), and the story collection At the Jim Bridger(Picador paperback 2003) His short stories have appeared in Esquire, Harpers, The New Yorker, Gentlemen's Quarterly, Epoch, The North American Review and other journals, as well as