“Allen Barnett knew how to plait the somber and the sardonic. His work is as light as it is dark, as funny as it is heart-breaking.  I met him only once at a gay literary conference in San Francisco and, with that instant mixture of sincerity and intimacy for which we Americans are famous, he said to me, “I wish I didn’t have to die so young.  There’s still so much I want to write.”  Every page is as fresh and immediate as the day he wrote it; we can only prize the masterful stories in this collection and regret there aren’t many others.”  —Edmund White, A Boy’s Own Story and Genet: A Biography