The Devil’s Tub: Collected Stories

Edward Hoagland, best known for his essays, is also an extraordinary writer of fiction, as readers of his stories "The Final Fate of the Alligators" and "Kwan's Coney Island" can attest. First published in periodicals such as the Paris Review, Esquire, the New Yorker, New American Review, and Saul Bellow's famous literary magazine, the Noble Savage, Hoagland's stories amazed readers with their precise language and finely etched characters. Assembled here are stories new and old, spanning from 1955 to today.

Meet the death-defying motorcycle trick riders in the carnival's Devil's Tub, a man who keeps an alligator in his bathtub, a Chinese laundryman in search of love at Coney Island, a frontiersman who saves himself from being mauled by a grizzly bear by hiding in a beaver house, three carnies looking for trouble at a rodeo, a washed-out boxer trying to hang onto his career, and dozens of other rich characters. From the crammed and gritty streets of New York City to the bristling wilderness of the Old West, Hoagland's characters pine, ache, observe, love, learn, and live in such precisely rendered stories that we are transported into each of their peculiar worlds.

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Edward Hoagland has written more than twenty books in sixty years, including travel memoirs (such as Alaskan Travels), essay collections (such as The Courage of Turtles), and novels (such as Children are Diamonds). He worked in the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus while attending Harvard, and later traveled the world from Yemen to Antarctica to Assam, writing for national magazines. He has received numerous literary awards, and taught at ten colleges and universities. A native New Yorker, he divides his time between Martha’s Vineyard and a farmhouse in the mountains of northern Vermont.