This new collection by award-winning author Reginald Gibbons explores human experience and memory in ordinary settings—city apartments, rural roads, soap operas, and juvenile court—as way to understand the depths of thought and feeling in our everyday encounters. These narrative meditations explode with imagery, looking and listening deeply into our everyday experience—the extraordinary within the ordinary, the impossible within the possible.Reginald Gibbons is the author of numerous collections of poetry and fiction. His book Creatures of a Day was a poetry finalist for the National Book Award. He lives in Evanston, IL, where he teaches at Northwestern University.

Goyen passes on traditional conventions of plot and character. The House of Breath is an address to the people and places the narrator remembers from his childhood in small Texas town, Charity. The novel is a meditation on the nature of identity and origins, memory, and time's annihilation of life. This is the restored version, going back to Goyen's originally published version from 1950 with an afterword from Reginald Gibbons, professor of English at Northwestern University and the former editor of TriQuarterly Magazine.