Decoration Day—And Other Stories

Decoration Day and Other Stories ranges in locale from the piney woods of Deep East Texas, to the mean streets of Memphis, to the suburbs of Washington, DC. Highly comic and deeply serious, the collection reaches from the late 19th century to the present day. The title story centers on elderly sisters striving to save an unjustly accused man from a lynch mob, while at the same time fetch home a wagonload of flowering bushes to commemorate their dead in the family cemetery. Captive to private delusions and bound to dreams of what ought to be, each character in Duff's eleven stories struggles for escape, redemption, and the healing power of memory.
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GERALD?DUFF'S?short stories and poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Southwest Review, Sewanee Review, Georgia Review, Missouri Review, and other magazines. In addition to a memoir and two collections of poetry, he has published seven novels and a collection of short stories, Fire Ants, which was a finalist for the Jesse Jones Award for Fiction in 2008 from the Texas Institute of Letters. The title story won the Cohen Award from Ploughshares and was reprinted in The Editors’ Choice: New American Stories and cited in The Best American Short Stories.
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