In the Gloaming

First edition. 8vo. 288 pp. Quarter-bound yellow backstrip over mustard-coloured cloth boards, stamped in purple foil to spine; deckled fore-edges. Index. Jacket design by Michael Accordino featuring oil painting detail of The Lantern Bearers (1908), by Maxfield Parris. Dust jacket blurbs by Updike, Chabon, Gaitskill, etc.

Author's second collection of short stories, set in the fictional town of Wynnemoor. The title story first appeared in The New Yorker in 1993. Christopher Reeve made it into a critically acclaimed HBO film in 1997, with Glenn Close, Bridget Fonda, Whoopi Goldberg, and Robert Sean Leonard. "In Alice Elliott Dark's 'In the Gloaming', a mother tends her son as he dies of AIDS, and in doing so reclaims the maternal bond; few of these stories are more quietly modulated and more moving than this one." –John Updike, from his introduction to The Best American Short Stories of the Century