These darkly comic and earnestly intimate stories combine the incisive energy of the essayistic with the willing gaze of the individualistic outsider, bringing a freshness to this collection of short fiction, containing award-winning pieces alongside a brand-new gem, that smacks of real life: surprising, unexpected, and intense. A young man digs a canal through his record collection. An expectant father falls in love with a revolver. A woman learns a tornado has leveled her neighboring town, and she is overjoyed, because she hated that town; and a college professor in the near, twisted future is required to carry a gun into his classroom, where he finds that, with a firearm under his jacket, the students finally pay him the attention he deserves. Told with mordant wit, these nine stories show us what happens when what we need is a friend but instead we get something far, far worse.
These darkly comic and earnestly intimate stories combine the incisive energy of the essayistic with the willing gaze of the individualistic outsider, bringing a freshness to this collection of short fiction, containing award-winning pieces alongside a brand-new gem, that smacks of real life: surprising, unexpected, and intense. A young man digs a canal through his record collection. An expectant father falls in love with a revolver. A woman learns a tornado has leveled her neighboring town, and she is overjoyed, because she hated that town; and a college professor in the near, twisted future is required to carry a gun into his classroom, where he finds that, with a firearm under his jacket, the students finally pay him the attention he deserves. Told with mordant wit, these nine stories show us what happens when what we need is a friend but instead we get something far, far worse.