Ron Carlson is the author of six story collections and six novels, most recently Return to Oakpine (Viking). His fiction has appeared in Esquire, Harpers, The New Yorker, GQ, and many other magazines and journals and has been selected for The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Series, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction and dozens of other anthologies. He is the Director of the Graduate Program in Fiction at the University of California, Irvine and lives in Huntington Beach, California.