Includes bibliographical references and index.

Foreword: The Birth of Music from the Spirit of Comedy / Robert Morgan ix -- Chappell's Community of Commentators: An Introduction / Patrick Bizzaro 1 -- 1 Letters from a Distant Lover: The Novels of Fred Chappell / R. H. W. Dillard 6 -- 2 On Reading The Inkling by Fred Chappell in a Building on the UNC-G Campus / Kelly Cherry 27 -- 3 Darker Vices and Nearly Incomprehensible Sins: The Fate of Poe in Fred Chappell's Early Novels / George Hovis 28 -- 4 Chappell's Women: Models from the Early Novels / Shelby Stephenson 51 -- 5 "Growth of a Poet's Mind" and the Problem of Autobiography: Distance and Point of View in the Writings of Fred Chappell / Patrick Bizzaro 72 -- 6 Metanarrative and the Story of Life in the Kirkman Tetralogy / J. Spencer Edmunds 92 -- 7 Search for Moral Order in Moments of Light / Rebecca Smith 119 -- 8 Myth and Mundane in More Shapes Than One / Traci Lazenby 132 -- 9 Shape of Truth: Men and Women in Fred Chappell's More Shapes Than One / Rosemary Cox 150 -- 10 Kirkman Novels: First and Last Concerns / Peter Makuck 167 -- 11 Flashing Phantasmagoria of Rational Life: The Platonic Borderlands of Fred Chappell's Forever Tetraology / Warren Rochelle 186 -- 12 Windies and Rusties: Fred Chappell As Humorist / John Lang 204 -- 13 Tracing the Hawk's Shadow: Fred Chappell As Storyteller / Karen Janet McKinney 219 -- 14 Tales Tall and True: Fred Chappell's Look Back All the Green Valley and the Continuity of Narrative Tradition / James W. Kirkland 239 -- 15 Too Many Freds / Fred Chappell 256.