Tony Earley was born in 1961 in San Antonio, Texas. He studied English at Warren Wilson College, North Carolina, and creative writing at the Univesity of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. A collection of his short stories, Here we are in Paradise, is published by Little Brown. In 1996 he was named as one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists. ‘The Birthday Boy’, his story from that issue, is taken from his first novel, Jim the Boy, published by Little, Brown.