Thom Jones, whose "ferocious, semiautobiographical short stories about boxers, custodians, soldiers, crime victims, cancer patients and asylum inmates coupled a fateful machismo--the eternal pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer was his hero--with grim humor," died October 13, the New York Times reported. He was 71. His first collection, A Pugilist at Rest (1993), was a National Book Award finalist, and, in 1999, Jones "ended a meteoric decade with another well-received anthology, Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine. He later worked on screenplays and a novel," the Times noted. Jones also published the story collection Cold Snap.
"These are people you wouldn't want living next door to you," he told the Mississippi Review in 1999. "Even I wouldn't want them living next door. But it's fun to drop in on them occasionally and see what sort of preposterous activities they are up to."
Jones "survived a Dickensian childhood, self-hate and a brain injury from boxing that resulted in temporal lobe epilepsy," the Times wrote. In 1993, he told an interviewer: "Before my injury, I wasn't inclined to be a reader, or obsessed with God and the meaning of life. Ever since this happened to me, I've been a more introspective guy, constantly reading philosophy, studying world religions and then having a fever, literally a fever, to write. It's a lust, an obsession, to put it down, and in the act of writing I'm not Thom Jones. And it's such a relief to not be Thom Jones."