Candle in the Dark and Other Stories

Mark Allen Boone is a native Chicagoan who grew up on Chicago's Near West Side. He is a graduate of the University of Illinois at Chicago. In the mid-1980s, he joined Contemporary Books, where he rose from editor to editorial director of its adult education division. On weekends, he was fiction editor for the quarterly AIM (America's Intercultural Magazine), a post he held for more than 25 years. In 1990, he founded the West Side Writers Guild, a support group for aspiring West Side writers who lacked a forum in which to share their work. He has been a freelance writer, editor, and publishing consultant, guiding aspiring authors through the self-publication process. He and his wife Cynthia live in Chicago's western suburbs and are the parents of two children and the grandparents of four.

A collection of ten short stories set largely on Chicago's West Side, written over a span of twenty years (1975-1995), that focus on residents of a part of the city whose day-to-day lives have rarely if ever been immortalized in fiction. The anthology features the eponymous "Candle in the Dark," winner of the 1975 Triton College New Writer's Workshop Award for best short story, published in the Fall 1980 issue of AIM Magazine, and the story "Beatitude" originally published as "Brunswick Stew" in the collection West Side Stories, by City Stoop Press in 1993. Other published stories in the collection include: "Day Work," previously published in the Spring 1985 issue of AIM Magazine and the stories "A Qualified Prospect," (1996); "A Mortgage Burning Party," (1996); and "The Derelict" (1996), all published previously in Guildworks: Writing by the West Side Writers Guild published by Blacksmith Press.