The Pugilist at Rest

Thom Jones's magnificent collection of stories presents a brutal and authentic vision of the human condition, in a world without mercy or redemption. <i>The Pugilist at Rest</i> gives us an America of Vietnam vets and ex-boxers, of bitter lovers in trailer parks, of lives passing in brilliant epileptic flickers. These ferocious, semi-autobiographical stories form the debut collection by a distinctive and hugely talented writer. <br><br>Thom Jones was discovered as a writer relatively late in life, in his forties, by the fiction editors at the <i>New Yorker</i>, who published many of Jones's stories from the early 1990s onwards. The title story of this collection went on to win the O. Henry Award for Best Short Story.