{"product_id":"9781477163924","title":"Free Beer Tomorrow: A Book of Stories","description":"Thoreau once surmised that most of us lead lives of quiet desperation.  Reading   these stories brings Thoreau’s words to mind. The characters are found in settings in   the Deep South in the days of Huey Long in Louisiana; in present day New York City   with its current economic hardships and other difficult  goings on; and in several    Mississippi locales..  The characters exist in quiet desperation.  Isolated within   Themselves all face crisis and loss.  And yet somehow they struggle to cope with the   hope they will prevail.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e   In the title story a Cajun bartender struggles against fate and the two sons who   have “stolen” his farm.  A farmer turned bartender, Joe Lee LeBlanc sues his boys   to recover the farm.  His story circulates.  He has his few minutes of   fame as interest in his case grows.  People stop ignoring the khakis-clad   bartender.  They ask about progress in his cause.  Of course free beer   and tomorrow never arrive.  The old bartender never gets his day in court.  Chekhov’s  story, The Lament, is recalled as one reads FBT, set in  Opelousas, Louisiana, during the  Yambilee Festival.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The shadow world of cockfighting with its unlawfulness and potential for   violence is the environment where one youngster is coming of age.  The Cockfighters,  reminiscent of Sherwood Anderson’s  I Want To Know Why, and Ernest Hemingway’s   My Old Man, also has a Louisiana locale where the law and the Church (ironically in the   Parish of St. Landry) turn a blind eye to the blood “sport” in which fighting cocks   usually duel to the death.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e   An unknown assailant kills the boy’s father after a highly wagered cockfight.  The  Lad, freed from the sport, is urged to get an education by his guardian, a former prostitute   and the mistress of the dead father.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e   At the end of the story, the father’s murder remains unsolved.  And a sable rooster   with a fighting spirit, a bird the family pinned its hopes on, is killed in a cockpit battle it   was supposed to win.  We are left to ponder what part the little cock had to do   with the death of the father after the little bird is found nailed to a post outside the   cockfighting arena.   The question of the boy’s true understanding of his father’s   profession remains unresolved. The boy is last seen studying hard in school, reading  Hemingway and thinking about horseracing as a career.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    In The Picaninny, an African American child is forced to leave the South after  innocently kissing a white boy.  Later she finds fame as a singer in the North.  She   returns to  her “roots” in Mississippi.  She finds change and understanding after talking    to a crippled white man from her past.  She leaves Mississippi a second time but without  “ baggage”.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e   The protagonist in To Kill A Kingfish races against time to stop his cousin from   killing Louisiana’s  former governor (U.S. Senator Huey Long in the story).  The tale   unfolds as the protagonist’s grandson attempts to unravel a relative’s ties to the   assassination plot.  In the end the grandson “scruples” and decides to let the story remain   unrecorded.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e   The WWII pilot hero of Beau Chandler’s Wonderful Bedroom returns from the  Battle and settles in New York City.  He finds the perfect one bedroom that eventually   becomes the prize in a battle of another sort. Chandler, a gentile, and Kahan, a   Jew who manages the building,  are both obsessed with the apartment but for different   reasons.  Both men are oblivious to some of the reasons the war was fought.  There is no   brotherly love in the story.  In the end the old pilot, an alcoholic, dies in a fall down a   stairwell.  Was he pushed over the railing by Kahan?  Does the old man simply give up   the fight?  In the end the thought lingers: how easily man is motivated to kill.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Xlibris US","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47130740785392,"sku":"9781477163924","price":8.49,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781477163924_p0.jpg?v=1763612045","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781477163924","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}