{"product_id":"the-old-priest-hardcover","title":"The Old Priest - Hardcover","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Old Priest\u003c\/i\u003e is a book of transformations. From the cigar-smoke-and-mirrors world of casino life, to the collection's title character morphing into a goat-man before the narrator's eyes, to a family drama upended by a miniature dinosaur in the backyard, Anthony Wallace writes about life-changing events. The characters seek to escape their earthly boundaries through artifice and fantasy, and those boundaries can be as elegant and fragile as a martini glass or as hardscrabble as an Indian reservation. In these eight vividly detailed short stories we encounter cheating husbands, neurotic housewives, out-of-control teenagers, desperate gamblers, deluded alcoholics, and a host of others who would like a chance at something more. Some face the consequences of their actions, while others simply begin to see what they've been missing all along. Through wry, ironic prose--and what feels like firsthand experience--Wallace describes a comic and often misguided search for self-knowledge in the most unlikely locations--like the Emerald City, a low-rent gambling den where a cocktail waitress dressed as an X-rated Dorothy offers gamblers more than a Scotch on the rocks; or the Bastille Hotel-Casino, where a dealer dressed as an eighteenth century footman deals five-dollar blackjack to a reminiscing Holocaust survivor. Occasionally a real demon appears, but the collection is mostly about personal demons and the possibility of exorcising them. The stories in \u003ci\u003eThe Old Priest\u003c\/i\u003e have to do with time and memory, and they convincingly open out beyond ordinary daily time to reveal something else--the present moment, perhaps, but a larger, more mysterious conception of it.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":68356197843167,"sku":"9780822944294","price":33.48,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/h6t0KqnTPc9780822944294.webp?v=1793451055","url":"https:\/\/blackandbarhe.com\/products\/the-old-priest-hardcover","provider":"Black \u0026 Barhe Bookstore","version":"1.0","type":"link"}