"Did you ever see one of those air shows they put on at 
county fairs?  A high flying act where a woman in goggles 
and overalls climbs from the cockpit while the pilot puts 
the plane through loop-the-loops and snap rolls? . . . You 
know the trick that keeps her from falling?  She never lets 
go with one hand until she's got a firm grip on something 
solid with the other." The hard part for Marta Sinclair, 
heroine of the title story of Don Meredith's collection, is 
to discover what is solid, what illusory.


This dilemma occupies Meredith's fiction.  With a style 
pitched to the nuances of character and setting, the stories 
in Wing Walking move from California's posh suburbs 
through the small towns of rural America to the coast of Turkey 
and the Tuscan hills.  The characters are as diverse as the 
settings: from little Zatha Monroe struggling to play Mozart's 
D Minor Concerto on a garden hose to the shenanigans of art 
historian Eduardo Volpe, "skeptic, scholar, aesthete, renowned 
spelunker in the deep cave of the Italian Renaissance." These 
ten stories cover a wide range of character and feeling, but 
the author remains focused on the difficulty of distinguishing 
reality from illusion.



_________________________________________________________


Born and raised in Southern California, DON MEREDITH migrated 
to San Francisco in 1960.  Within a few years he sailed for 
Europe, where he lived on a Dalmatian island, then for ten 
years on a Tuscan farm.  Twice a recipient of fellowships from 
the National Endowment for the Arts, he's the author of novels,
short stories, essays and travel articles. Meredith's 
publications include two novels, Morning Line and Home Movies, 
and a collection of essays due out in late 2000 from The 
University of South Carolina Press, Where the Tigers Were: 
Travels Through Literary Landscapes.  He and his wife 
Josie make their home on Lamu Island, Kenya.