Bright Angels and Familiars anthologizes for the first time the full sweep of contemporary Mormon short fiction. Beginning with Virginia Sorensen and Maurine Whipple, the best of Mormondom's "lost generation" of the 1940s-50s, it progresses to Douglas Thayer and Donald R. Marshall, the first in a new generation of the 1970s-80s to produce complete collections of stories; and to Lewis Horne and Levi S. Peterson, the first to be nationally published and honored. It concludes with recent and increasingly prominent writers such as Phyllis Barber, John Bennion, Orson Scott Card, Neal Chandler, Judith Freeman, Walter Kirn, and Margaret Blair Young.

Eugene England is a former professor of English literature and associate director of the Honors Program at Brigham Young University, as well as past president of the Association for Mormon Letters. He is the author of Beyond Romanticism, The Best of Lowell L. Bennion, Brother Brigham, Dialogues With Myself, Making Peace, The Quality of Mercy, and Why the Church Is as True as the Gospel. He is the compiler and editor of Converted to Christ Through the Book of Mormon, An Open World, Harvest, and Tending the Garden, and a contributor to Book of Mormon Authorship, Multiply and Replenish, Peculiar People, Personal Voices, and The Prophet Puzzle.