Closers

Closers collects the work of many of America's finest literary voices on a subject long at the heart of our commercial culture. Included here are famous pieces that have shaped our vision of the salesman's life - selections from Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross, along with memorable fiction from writers as well known and diverse as Raymond Carver, John Cheever, M. F. K. Fisher, Flannery O'Connor, Richard Price, Eudora Welty, and Thomas Wolfe. The selections range over nearly the entire twentieth century: they are witty and dark, by turns celebratory and white-knuckle desperate. Many - from an early Edna Ferber story to Michael Dorris's eye-opening "Jeopardy" - are fresh and surprising, while even the most familiar of the works retain their power even as they are thrown into relief by their context. Taken together these stories illuminate every corner of the salesperson's emotional landscape, and constitute a provocative mosaic of the foot soldiers of our bottom-line culture.