A Cast of Characters

Book excerpt: From the Editor: An old friend of mine once said to me, “You oughta go ahead and get the graveyard people to cut your stone now. Have ’em write on there, ‘If this is anything like his life, he won’t be here long.’ ”I’ve thought a dozen times to get a paperweight-size version of that very epitaph. I’ll get around to it someday. Or the graveyard people will. Anyway, with this short attention span I’m blessed with, I sat at my breakfast table on an Alabama springtime morning, ideas sprouting like the green outside my window, and a thought ran by: What could we do differently with the Blue Moon Café anthology? Nothing wrong with it the way it is. But that’s not the point. I thought about that little hardback I bought in the Pensacola airport, which fit so nicely into my sport coat pocket, and which I finished before I completed the loop down and back from the Miami International Book Fair: Gabriel García Márquez’s Memories of My Melancholy Whores. I fell so in love with that small volume that I used a couple precious minutes of my allotted seven on the book fair panel to read from the brief work that extends infinitely in my mind. Aha! Let’s make the next Blue Moon Café book fit into a coat pocket, a purse. Let’s peg the meter with exceptional literary talent. Let’s give readers less on their plates, but more to digest. More provocation. More beauty, horror, and sadness. More loving insight into the comedy and tragedy of the human situation.And readers’ palates, of course, will judge the effort. Here’s betting their decision leads to a long life for this new edition of our book of stories served up from the Blue Moon Café.