Life is a kind of dream . So is the art we make in response to life. In A Kind of Dream, five generations of an artistic family explore the ups and downs of life, discovering that for an artist even failure is success, because the work matters more than the self. Fame, death, rash self-destruction, laughter, the excitement of making good art, love, marriage, being a mother, being a father, the appreciation of beauty, and always life—life itself, life in all its shapes and guises—it's all here.

Kelly Cherry has previously published twenty-one books, nine chapbooks, and two translations of classical drama, including the novels My Life and Dr. Joyce Brothers, Augusta Played, We Can Still Be Friends, In the Wink of an Eye, and The Lost Traveller's Dream. Her stories have been reprinted in Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize, and New Stories from the South and she received the Dictionary of Literary Biography Award for best volume of short stories (The Society of Friends) published in 1999. She is a former Poet Laureate of Virginia and the Eudora Welty Professor Emerita of English and Evjue-Bascom Professor Emerita in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She lives in rural Virginia.