I have written a series of stories that deal with the city of Memphis. I have used James Joyce's Dubliners and Edward P. Jones' Lost in the City as models for what I have written. Many of the stories deal with Memphis history and mid-south culture. I also carried out research about Memphis history in order to write some of the stories. A few of the stories—“Exhibit X” and “Script,” for example—play with point-of-view and chronology. There are two stories—“Mouse House” and “Fat Man”—written in an essayistic form. There are few scenes in those two stories, and little dialogue: instead, a first-person narrator relates the events. The Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard was a major influence in these two more discursive stories. The writers Barry Hannah, Denis Johnson, Joyce Carol Oates, and Raymond Carver were influences on the stories written in a Gothic mode. The stories written in this Gothic mode include “Before Grenada,” “Parrot,” “In the Desert,” and “Family Dog.”