Sonny Liston was a friend of mine

Thom Jones's world encompasses dilapidated fight arenas, state mental hospitals, and chaotic emergency rooms. The inhabitants are his brilliantly etched characters, who battle desperately against fate in a game of life they cannot win but dare not lose. Now, with Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine, Jones serves up a dozen powerful stories that teeter between wicked humor and stinging pathos. In "Fields of Purple Forever," a Vietnam vet swims alone across the English Channel, the Straits of Gibraltar, and the Bosporus to maintain "the edge" that kept him alive in wartime - and which is all he now has left. "You Cheated, You Lied" tells the deranged love story of two unstable people abandoning their lives and medications to live together in a shack on a Honolulu beach - with disastrous results. And in the title story, a young amateur fighter stoically endures repetitive beatings because he knows the world of boxing shields and protects him from the even crueler world outside the ring.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.