If you don't know Ed McClanahan, this "anthology of his essays, reviews, short stories, and novel excerpts (from early drafts) ought to do the trick" (Booklist). Highlighting the collection is "Grateful Dead I Have Known," a long prize-winning meditation about Jerry Garcia and the fanatical devotion of his fans. Also collected here for the first time are McClanahans's earliest short stories, along with book reviews, lost chapters of The Natural Man, and a substantial afterword to Famous People I Have Known. His recollections of famous friends and fellow travelers form an integral part of this book. He joins his buddy Ken Kesey in a bus-journey reunion with other gray-haired Merry Pranksters, and he pokes fun at his own graduate-school flamboyance in a touching remembrance of his mentor Wallace Stegner.

At age twenty-three, Debbie Gisonni had everything. She was on her way to becoming one of the top paid and youngest executives in Silicon Valley. She had found true love?and she could make a mean cannoli! Then in 1984, her mother Vita developed a brain tumor that left her permanently disabled. A few years later, her younger sister suddenly committed suicide. Within months her father was diagnosed with bone cancer and breast cancer struck her favorite aunt. Between 1990 and 1994, all of them died. Vita?s Will: Real Life Lessons About Life, Death & Moving On is a chronicle of Gisonni?s unimaginable experiences. One day she was on the corporate fast track; the next she left it all so that she could stop and smell the red sauce.

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