This book is not horrible. I absolutely loved Richard Hall's "Backwards". It's an incredible enough short story that I'm keeping this book simply to have that story. I also thought that Andrew Holleran's "Friends at Evening", a story of three men on their way to the funeral of another, captures something crucial of 1980s AIDs crisis.  

One problem with this collection is that five of the eighteen stories are excerpts from novels rather than actual pieces of short fiction. As far as I, a lover of short work, am concerned that means it only has thirteen stories. Thirteen stories is a perfectly acceptable number of pieces for an anthology, but it's a bit disappointing when one expects eighteen. 

The second problem is that many of these stories feel incomplete. No sense of closure or completeness of arc exists in them. It is perhaps no small coincidence that an editor who feels that excerpts have a place in an anthology isn't troubled by shorts that fail to be a total story.

I suppose I could push through the final five stories in this book, but I'm too old to spend time with books or people who don't inspire my mind.