Birds Landing: Stories (Illinois Short Fiction) - Hardcover

Ernest Finney's first collection marks an auspicious debut for an accomplished writer whose characters would feel right at home in a movie like Five Easy Pieces. You won't find these people in the halls of academe or commerce or government.  They're knee deep in a marsh, waiting for a green-wing teal, or bone tired in a cocktail lounge waiting on boozy customers, or dodging a holdup at an all night grocery.

Lady Conveys Warm Image of California Family's Life.  
Paul Pintarich, Book Editor, The Oregonian.

"Fine novelists like Ernest Finney are capable of creating fictional families so believable that we share the pain and love that holds them together. In "The Lady With the Alligator Purse," Finney lets us into the lives of a California family whose members share not only pain and love, but also a hard-won and intricate understanding that brings them closer through each compelling chapter.  Hemingway said good novels must be truer than life itself, but we don't see those kinds of novels much anymore.  Finney is an exception."