Richard Yates was born in 1926 in New York and lived in California. His prize-winning stories began to appear in 1953 and his first novel, Revolutionary Road, was nominated for the National Book Award in 1961. He is the author of eight other works, including the novels A Good School, The Easter Parade, and Disturbing the Peace, and two collections of short stories, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness and Liars in Love.

Liars in Love is concerned with troubled relations and the elusive nature of truth:

Hope, dread, disorder, and a nervous entangling of separate lives in Greenwich Village during the Depression, as seen by a child, in 'Oh, Joseph, I’m So Tired'. The volatile, perilous course of events set in motion when two divorced mothers agree to “pool their resources” and live together, with their children in 'Trying Out for the Race'. A young American soldier’s too-abrupt postwar reunion, on foreign soil, with the lovely, dismayingly grown-up sister he hasn’t seen since he was eleven and she was ten, in 'A Compassionate Leave'.

The seven stories in this collection showcase Yates's extraordinary gift for observation and description. The last and longest of them, a rich, lucid, and compelling piece called 'Saying Goodbye to Sally', achieves a fitting conclusion for the book – and a resonant final statement of its theme.