This story collection-a finalist for the annual first fiction award presented by the Texas Institute of Letters-explores Austin, Texas, a city famous for music, football, and drunken fun frolics- and famous too for traffic jams, anomie, and dislocation. In Long Time Ago Good, Lowell Mick White imaginatively recreates this city, this region. Here is a folksy reporter covering a chitlins cook-off, a ragged cab driver fighting for his life, a lonely jewelrymaker focusing too much on the past-a high tech worker losing her job, a bureaucrat looking for something more. These stories are populated by depressed men, angry women, frustrated dogs, and fearful cats-filled with heat waves and heartbreaks, thunderstorms and belly-laughs: with all that is modern Texas- and America....