Empty Pockets

A brilliant collection of “nineteen new and sixty-four previously published stories from one of America’s masters of the form” (Largehearted Boy). In this volume, readers will be drawn into Herd’s fertile literary cornucopia as his vivid prose captures the imagination. Written with brevity and stark economy of language, these short vignettes are a sampling of the American landscape as seen through the eyes of characters from the proud and stoic to the broken and tragic. From high school love notes to a drug runner’s day; from a boy’s first fistfight to the unexpected aftermath of a woman’s first experience of marijuana, Herd’s stories travel the backroads, sending postcards of life as it is lived and providing “a fine overview to the work of a writer whose work eludes easy description, but remains ahead of its time” (Minneapolis Star-Tribune).