Elbow Room

A beautiful collection of short stories that explores blacks and whites today, Elbow Room is alive with warmth and humor. Bold and very real, these twelve stories examine a world we all know but find difficult to define. Whether a story dashes the bravado of young street toughs or pierces through the self-deception of a failed preacher, challenges the audacity of a killer or explodes the jealousy of two lovers, James Alan McPherson has created an array of haunting images and memorable characters in an unsurpassed collection of honest, masterful fiction.

James Alan McPherson (1943–2016) was the author of Hue and Cry, Railroad, and Elbow Room, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1978. His essays and short stories appeared in numerous periodicals— including The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly, Newsday, Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, and Double-Take—and anthologies such as volumes of The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Essays, and O. Henry Prize Stories. McPherson received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Prize Fellows Award, and was a professor of English at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in Iowa City.