The eight stories in Tracy Daugherty's second collection move through
the streets of Houston with the quick step of country music and the melancholy
humor of the blues. Romance and friendship develop in unlikely places, as
people meet across the divide of race and class. In "Comfort Me With Apples"
(winner of the 2000 Texas Institute of Letters Brazos Short Fiction Prize),
a man faces the loss of his family by helping others in their grief and finds
himself, unexpectedly, part of a new, extended web of relationships. In "A
Worried Song After Work," a young labor lawyer nearing burnout rediscovers
some of his earlier idealism as he tries to live up to what he perceives as the
lofty expectations of his blind date. In "Burying the Blues," a junior college
history teacher seeks out the origin of the Houston blues, interviewing aging
musicians and poking around black neighborhoods. What he discovers is
that knowing himself may be the hardest task of all. 

_________________________________________________________

TRACY DAUGHERTY is the author of three novels, Desire Provoked, What
Falls Away, and The Boy Orator (SMU Press, 1999), and a story collection,
The Woman in the Oil Field (SMU Press, 1996). He has received
fellowships from Bread Loaf and the National Endowment for the Arts and
has been a Fulbright participant. His short fiction has been honored with
the Texas Institute of Letters Brazos Bookstore Award for Best Short Story
and with the A. B. Guthrie Jr. Short Fiction Award. He is a professor of English
at Oregon State University and a member of the MFA faculty at Warren
Wilson College.




What people are saying about this book


"It Takes a Worried Man immerses us in the gritty cityscape of class,
race, and human encounters where little is clear, nothing is simple,
and fair play and a fair chance are as hard to come by as real
love."—Shelby Hearon

"A wise book, told with grit and tenderness, with wonderful images of 
all-too-human guys, survivors of tragedy, in love and out of love, as they
do their best to lead good lives in a morally bankrupt society."
—Tony Ardizzone

"No one has written this well of Houston, catching the run-down, random
quality of it, and the nuances, the rough and the smooth, of different
neighborhoods, of the diversity of populations. A political consciousness runs
like a richly lubricating river below all the stories' surfaces. Not many
have Daugherty's conscience, his moral connectedness, his passion for
the hidden and suppressed lives all around us.  Hallelujah!"—Rosellen Brown