This gathering of short fiction and essays traces the artistic development of the masterful southern stylist and storyteller Ed McClanahan. In this "autobiography of a voice," the earliest stories are gloomy tales of existential despair, full of flashing neon signs, fly-specked mirrors, and "characters whose eyes could be likened in various ways to black holes." How McClanahan's writing evolved into the ribald comedy for which he is well-loved is a mystery unveiled in his fascinating ars poetica, "Empathy Follows Sympathy." McClanahan's nonfiction includes firsthand accounts of the hippie culture into which he dove headlong upon arriving in California. From that era comes "Grateful Dead I Have Known," a long prize-winning meditation about Jerry Garcia and the fanatical devotion of his fans; an insider's portrait of beat hero Neal Cassady; and a chronicle of a bus-journey reunion with buddy Ken Kesey and other Merry Pranksters-long-hairs now become gray-hairs. Whether reflecting on the once-radical urgency of a generation now aging, or a childhood that fellow Kentuckian Wendell Berry describes in his afterword as "an ordeal of provinciality," McClanahan writes with warmth and hard-earned wisdom.