Barry Targan has published a significant body of distinguished fiction. His first novel, Kingdoms (1980), won the Associated Writing Programs Award in the Novel, and Surviving Adverse Seasons (1979), a collection of short fiction, received the Saxifrage Prize. Many of his short stories have been awarded Pushcart, O. Henry, or other prizes and have been reprinted in Best American Short Stories for various years or in other collections and anthologies of outstanding short fiction. For example, the title story of Harry Belten and the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto (1975) -- Targan's first fiction collection, which won the University of Iowa School of Letters Award in Short Fiction -- originally appeared in Esquire (July 1966) and was subsequently reprinted in three important anthologies of fiction and selected for radio broadcast by Voice of America. Stories from the Sixties, one of these anthologies, included Targan's work along with fiction by such writers as John Updike...